Unione di Centro

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Unione di Centro
Party logo
Lorenzo Cesa
Party executive Lorenzo Cesa (Segretario)
Antonio De Poli (Presidente)
founding December 6, 2002 (UDC)
February 28, 2008 (UdC)
coalition Casa delle Libertà (2002–08)
Nuovo Polo per l'Italia (2010–12)
Con Monti per l'Italia (2012–13)
Area Popolare (2013–16)
Center-right coalition (since 2017)
ideology Christian Democracy
International connections Christian Democratic International
European party European People's Party
EP Group EVP (until 2019)
MPs
0/630
Senators
3/320
MEPs
0/76
Headquarters ItalyItalyVia del Tritone 102, Rome
Website www.udc-italia.it

The Unione di Centro (UdC; German: Union der Mitte ) is a Christian Democratic party of the political center in Italy .

The predecessor was the Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e di Centro (Union of Christian Democrats and Center Democrats, UDC) , founded in 2002 . This was initially part of Silvio Berlusconi's center-right alliance Casa delle Libertà . In 2008, however, she founded the Unione di Centro alliance with several smaller parties. In the period that followed, the two organizations overlapped more and more, so that one eventually merged into the other. Since 2013 the UdC has clearly lost importance.

The party's coat of arms is the red cross on a white background, which was adopted by the Democrazia Cristiana and expresses its closeness to the Catholic Church , its newspaper is Noi Press . The UDC is a member of the European People's Party and the Christian Democratic International .

history

Creation of the UDC

Logo of the UDC 2006–2008

The UDC was created in 2002 from the merger of the Centro Cristiano Democratico (CCD) founded by Pier Ferdinando Casini in 1994 and the Cristiani Democratici Uniti (CDU) founded by Rocco Buttiglione in 1995 . The smaller Democrazia Europea also participated in the merger . All three emerged from the Democrazia Cristiana , which was the strongest party in Italy from the end of the war until its collapse following the clearing up of extensive corruption ties (" Mani pulite ") in the early 1990s. The CCD and CDU had split off from the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) because they were working together with Silvio Berlusconi's center-right alliance or did not want to support the PPI's support for the center-left government of Romano Prodi . In the political spectrum, they stood to the right of the more Christian-social oriented PPI.

The immediate forerunner of the UDC was the Biancofiore electoral alliance made up of the CCD and CDU, which had existed since September 2000 and, according to its own statements, wanted to bundle the forces of the center, but actually took part in the 2001 parliamentary elections as part of the center-right camp that made the election also won.

Marco Follini from the CCD became national secretary, Buttiglione from the CDU became party president. The UDC immediately joined the Berlusconi government to which its predecessor parties had already belonged. Buttiglione and Carlo Giovanardi (CCD) were ministers. The actual top politician and candidate of the party ( Leader ), however, was Pier Ferdinando Casini, who held the office of President of the Chamber of Deputies from 2001 to 2006 from its foundation until he left the party in 2016.

Developments 2005-08

The UDC is often affected by splits, which is not uncommon in Italy. In 2005, the Democrazia Cristiana per le Autonomie (DCA; led by Gianfranco Rotondi ) and the Movimento per l'Autonomia (MpA; Raffaele Lombardo ), which remained in the center-right coalition, came into being with the predominant participation of southern Italian members .

Nevertheless, the 2006 general election brought the best result in the history of the UDC. It got 6.8% of the vote, which was reflected in 39 of the 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 21 of 315 in the Senate.

Marco Follini, who had resigned as National Secretary in 2006 due to government policy and was replaced by Lorenzo Cesa , left the party after the parliamentary elections to - together with two other MPs - found the new party Italia di Mezzo , which is attached to the center -left alliance and finally merged in 2007 in the Partito Democratico .

Carlo Giovanardi and other party members left the UDC in 2008 to join Berlusconi's new center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL).

The foundation of the UdC in 2008

Pier Ferdinando Casini was for many years the "face" of the UDC

The essential core of the new formation was the reunification of UDC and Rosa per l'Italia on February 28, 2008, after the latter separated from the former just 20 days earlier in protest against Casini's rapprochement with Silvio Berlusconi's center-right alliance Casa delle Libertà and became an independent one Course had announced the middle. Two weeks later, however, there was a renewed break between Casini and Berlusconi, the electoral provisions in particular suggested a quick reunification of the divided wing of the party: the overcoming of the threshold clauses (4% for election to the Chamber of Deputies and 8% to the Senate ) applied to both Powers are only secured if they join forces as quarto polo (“fourth pole” alongside PdL , PD and Sinistra-Arcobaleno ). The common top candidate was Casini. Immediately after the compromise negotiated, other groups and personalities joined the list, including the former Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita , who left the PD for this purpose.

On April 14, 2008, the UdC received 5.6% of the votes cast in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies and thus managed to move in with 36 members, while in the Senate elections with 5.7% it only managed to move into the Sicily region with three senators - there she received 8.7% of the vote. In the formation of a government by Berlusconi's new center-right alliance, however, the new formation did not play a decisive role, since the PdL had a sufficient majority of its own with its partners Lega Nord and Movimento per l'Autonomia .

On the 3rd / 4th In April 2009 a joint congress of the member parties decided to found a joint party. To this end, a coordination office, the Costituente di Centro , was set up to work out joint positions. For the European elections in Italy in 2009 , the UdC entered with a joint electoral list, received 6.5% of the votes and five seats. In the course of the next few years, various prominent politicians from the PdL and PD announced their transfer to the UdC. In addition, various small parties and political groups declared their participation in the Constituente . In mid-2010, however, there were also internal conflicts, as a group of members of the UdC leadership accused of moving too far to the left in opposition to Berlusconi. In September 2010, the I Popolari di Italia Domani (PID) grouping around Francesco Saverio Romano split off and voted in a parliamentary vote of confidence for Berlusconi.

From the end of 2010, the cooperation between the UdC and other parties in the center intensified, above all the Alleanza per l'Italia (a split from the PD), the Futuro e Libertà per l'Italia (a split from the PdL) and the Sicilian Movimento per le autonomy . Together with other small parties, they founded the Nuovo Polo per l'Italia (initially known as Polo della Nazione , colloquially often as Terzo Polo , "third pole") in January 2011 , an informal body to control the voting behavior of the groups in the Italian Parliament coordinate.

Disintegration since the 2013 general election

For the parliamentary elections in Italy in 2013 , UdC was part of the alliance of Mario Monti ( Scelta Civica ), whose market-economy-oriented reform course the party supported. UdC only achieved 1.8% of the votes and was elected to parliament with 8 members of parliament and 2 senators. It has not since recovered from this massive loss of importance.

For the European elections in Italy in 2014 , the UdC allied with the Nuovo Centrodestra , a spin-off from Forza Italia led by Interior Minister Angelino Alfano . The joint list NCD-UdC received 4.4% of the votes and moved into the European Parliament with 3 members (2 members of the NCD and one member of the UDC). The NCD and UdC intensified their cooperation in the period that followed: In December 2014, they merged their parliamentary groups under the name Area Popolare . It was under this name that they ran in the regional elections in May 2015.

The alliance broke up in the run-up to the constitutional referendum in December 2016. While the NCD was one of the main proponents of the constitutional amendment, the UdC spoke out against it. The latter, however, was not in agreement on this question, so that the former UDC leader Pier Ferdinando Casini, Environment Minister Gian Luca Galletti and the then party president Gianpiero D'Alia left the UdC and founded the splinter party Centristi per l'Italia (CpI), which formed A short time later it was renamed Centristi per l'Europa (CpE). D'Alia declared the UdC "dead" in this context.

In the parliamentary elections in March 2018 , the UdC stood as part of the Noi con l'Italia list , to which a large number of small parties from the Christian Democratic and liberal-conservative spectrum have joined forces, which in turn belong to the center-right alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi . For the first time since 2008, the UdC is part of the Berlusconi camp again. This decision triggered a split under Giuseppe De Mita (the nephew of the former Christian Democratic Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita ) and the former national secretary of the UDC Marco Follini, who founded the party L'Italia è Popolare (IP), which with Casinis CpE , the Alternativa Popolare (AP) and other small parties formed the Civica Popolare list , which is part of Matteo Renzi's center-left camp . With 1.3 and 1.2 percent of the vote, Noi con l'Italia received four seats in each of the two chambers of parliament, of which three senatorial posts went to members of the UdC, but not a single seat in the Chamber of Deputies.

For the 2019 European elections , the UdC reached an agreement with Forza Italia: Lorenzo Cesa ran on the FI list in southern Italy, but did not receive enough votes to be re-elected.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elezioni: accordo tra Rosa Bianca e Udc Corriere della Sera 28 February, 2008
  2. ↑ De Mita capo al Senato lista con l'Unione di Centro. Pionati verso la Camera ( Memento of March 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Ottopagine.it, March 5, 2008