A Pair of Red Sneakers

“You see, I had left the scene to make room for the new leaders, but, given the results, I have been wrong...”, Massimo D’Alema says amid applauses and cheers. 53rd Italian Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000, and first Italian and NATO country’s Prime Minister to come from a Communist Party thus started over again from Tricase, Apulia, Italy his “mission impossible” – to carry Pietro Grasso’s new party Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal) into parliament. “Once upon a time this was a Catholic Christian Democratic comune: the Italian Communist Party counted two municipal councilors, the Christian Democracy twenty-two... I remember the first time I came here, in the 1980s: we mounted the stage outside Tricase’s beautiful Matrix Church and when the people got out at the end of the Mass, as soon as they saw the hammer and sickle, they ran away. The parish priest was the only one who remained on the churchyard listening to me. His name was Don Tonino Bello. This time I was invited by a Catholic association and I’m gonna be speaking in the parish theatre”.

Massimo D’Alema visiting a shoe factory on the way of his electoral campaign. Photo: La Stampa.

Count Max

Former senior member of the Italian Communist Party, 53rd Italian Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000, and first Italian and NATO country’s Prime Minister to come from a Communist Party Massimo D’Alema (pictured centre) participated in a public debate at the Circolo ARCI di Santa Lucia in Prato, Italy on the evening of May 8, in order to introduce the Democratic and Progressist Movement (MDP), the new political subject founded by Pierluigi Bersani and others former PD members, aimed at joining all the left-wing parties that don’t recognize themselves in the Democratic Party’s policies. D’Alema defiantly called former Premier Matteo Renzi “little Berlusconi” and said that the Democratic Party is a “genetically modified organism (GMO) which is dangerous to health”. Mr. D’Alema’s courageous choice to hold the debate in Prato was rewarded by the presence of Sesto Fiorentino Mayor Lorenzo Falchi (seated next to D’Alema) and the spokeswoman of Prato’s middle school students Mrs. Ginevra Calamai. Photo: Il Tirreno.

Touchless knockout

“I hope now Renzi will give up his will to scrap other people”, former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told l’Unità.tv. “If there had not been such a significant part of the Centre-Left to fight for the ‘No’ vote, we would have left this outcome in the hands of the Right and Five Star. Since the Left has been striving for it, I believe that now this result belongs to all Italians”.

Red String of Fate

“I cannot speak, in respect with observing the electoral silence. The pencil, however, worked well”, former senior member of the Italian Communist Party, 53rd Italian Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000, and first Italian and NATO country’s Prime Minister to come from a Communist Party Massimo D’Alema joked with the journalists after casting his vote at the polling station for the Italian constitutional referendum in Via Col di Lana in Rome, Italy. Photo: Adnkronos.