Fausto Bertinotti

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Fausto Bertinotti, 2007

Fausto Bertinotti (born March 22, 1940 in Milan ) is an Italian communist politician.

Bertinotti was from 1994 to 2006 national secretary of the party of the new communist foundation (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) and until November 2007 chairman of the European Left Party . He was a member of the European Parliament . Between May 2006 and April 2008 he was President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies .

After the defeat of the left-wing electoral alliance La Sinistra - L'Arcobaleno , whose top candidate he ran in the Italian parliamentary elections in 2008 and which failed to get into both chambers of parliament with 3.1 to 3.2% of the votes cast, Bertinotti announced his complete withdrawal from politics.

Political activity

In PSIUP and PCI

Bertinotti, who grew up in Milan as the son of a train driver, devoted himself to union work after studying engineering (initially in the textile industry). In 1964 he joined the Socialist Party ( PSI ), from whose left wing the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity ( PSIUP ) split off in the same year , to which Bertinotti belonged in the following years. The PSIUP took up the radical traditions of Italian left-wing socialism, absorbed impulses from operaism and took part in the factory council movement after 1968. In the 1968 elections, the party achieved 4.45%; In 1972 it fell below 2 percent. As a result of these election results, the majority of the members, including Bertinotti, joined the great communist PCI in 1972 . In her Bertinotti was the former chief editor of the party newspaper L'Unità and temporary parliamentary president Pietro Ingrao close, which in turn was heavily influenced by the undogmatic new left and a counterweight both to the tendency towards the reformist party majority also to the "pro-Moscow" traditionalists by Armando Cossutta formed . Bertinotti did not make a party career, but continued to work in the communist trade union federation CGIL, in whose leadership he rose in the 80s.

When the last PCI party congress in February 1991 decided with a two-thirds majority to transform it into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) , Bertinotti was one of the opponents of parting with communism. Nevertheless, like his mentor Ingrao, he initially remained a member of the successor party PDS, as he saw better starting conditions for political work in its broad mass base than in the Rifondazione comunista (PRC) founded by Armando Cossutta. In the CGIL, Bertinotti was at the forefront of the left- opposition Essere sindacato movement .

Side entry into the Rifondazione comunista

In 1993 Bertinotti left the PDS and joined the PRC. At the beginning of 1994 he became their national secretary as a “side entrant” and as such stood at the side of party chairman Cossutta. In the following years Bertinotti took over the leadership of the party more and more.

Cooperation and break with the center-left government

When in 1996 the non-party Romano Prodi formed a left government with the new party alliance Ulivo (olive tree) made up of PDS, former left Christian Democrats and left liberals, which, however, failed to achieve an absolute majority in parliament, a large majority in the PRC around Bertinotti and Cossutta passed the Ulivo Tolerance without direct accession to enable the formation of a government. From 1997, however, there were growing tensions over the reduction of working hours and deregulatory and flexible measures. In November 1998, Bertinotti pushed through his motion in the National Political Committee of the PRC to refuse the government to approve their draft budget, while Cossutta pleaded for the ulivo to continue despite all concerns, pointing to the imminent danger of a new right-wing government under Silvio Berlusconi to support. After losing the vote, Cossutta and his supporters left the PRC and founded the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI) . The voting behavior of the PRC led to the breach of the Prodi government, new elections and a new version of the Berlusconi government.

The "movement of movements"

As a result of the break with the Ulivo government, the PRC under Bertinotti was isolated for a long time and faced with hostility from all sides. Bertinotti tries to realign the PRC in terms of content. The party should seek solidarity with the emerging movement against neoliberal globalization . The PRC took part in the mass protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 and supported the subsequent radicalization of the trade union movement.

At the Fifth PRC Congress in April 2002, Bertinotti was confirmed as national secretary with 88 percent of the delegate's votes. The PRC reaffirmed the will to cooperate on an equal footing with all forces of the "Movement of Movements" against neoliberalism and war. At the same time it became apparent that considerable sections of the population, especially in the trade unions, expected the PRC to participate in a left-wing government that Berlusconi would be able to replace.

New cooperation with the reform left

From the end of 2002 Bertinotti initiated a rapprochement with the left-wing democrats (the PDS has since changed its name to DS), relying on the calls for a sharper left profile within the DS. While Bertinotti in 1997, in his book Le due sinistre , which prepared the break with the government, emphasized the contrast between a “liberal” left that accepts capitalism as an inevitable basis and the “antagonistic” left that strives to overcome it, he now argued, that the growing pressure of social movements and the increasingly combative stance of the trade unions within the moderate left are creating a tendency to the left, through which joint action becomes possible and necessary again.

During 2004, when the PRC's performance in the European elections (6.3 percent) confirmed Bertinotti's course, he repeatedly signaled the PRC's readiness to participate in a future center-left government. He demanded that the content-related issues should be clarified in the spirit of a participatory democracy with the participation of social movements. This earned him growing internal party criticism from parts of the PRC, which either rejected participation in government in general or called for clear conditions to be set for government cooperation with the moderate left by sharpening their own programmatic profile, instead of issuing a blank check, as Bertinotti was accused of . Eventually Bertinotti was accused of an autocratic leadership style; There were increasing complaints that Bertinotti announced the political line of the PRC, bypassing the party bodies and base, through interviews in bourgeois daily newspapers.

European unification of the left

Bertinotti has long been pointing out the need for a European unification of the left in order to be able to oppose the “neoliberal Europe of the EU Commission and the Maastricht Treaties ” with a “different Europe”. He therefore advocated the founding of the party of the European Left , which unanimously elected him chairman at its founding congress in Rome in May 2004. This step was also controversial within the PRC; Resistance comes primarily from the more traditional, “orthodox” wing of the party.

Publications

Bertinotti is the author of several book publications (many of them in the form of conversations with his long-time companion Alfonso Gianni).

  • La camera dei lavori. Ediesse, Rome, 1987
  • La democrazia autoritaria. Datanews, Rome, 1991
  • Tutti i colori del rosso (a cura di Lorenzo Scheggi Merlini). Sperling & Kupfer , Milan, 1995
  • Le due sinistre (con Alfonso Gianni). Sperling & Kupfer, Milan, 1997
  • Pensare il '68 (con Alfonso Gianni). Ponte alle Grazie, Milan, 1998
  • Le idee che non muoiono (con Alfonso Gianni). Ponte alle Grazie, Milan, 2000
  • Per una pace infinita (con Alfonso Gianni). Ponte alle Grazie, Milan, 2002

Honors

In January 2005, the left-liberal daily Il nuovo riformista Bertinotti awarded the “Oscar of Politics” for 2004, justifying this by saying that by rejecting all terrorism and advocating non-violence as a guideline for social movements, he had broken with the foundations of communism - A praise that parts of the PRC and the Orthodox left took as proof that Bertinotti successfully ingratiated himself with the opponent and counted on applause from the wrong side.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sinistra sconfitta, Bertinotti lascia Corriere della Sera 14 April, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Bertinotti, Fausto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian politician (communist), MEP
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Milan