The Establishment PD and Radical Anti-Zionism: A Double Blind Alley

The Italian Left is not simply divided — it is divided badly. Its fractures do not open up political possibilities, produce ideas, or build alternatives. They stage two versions of the same defeat: a government Left without a people and a protest Left without a project.

Fragmentation is the symptom, not the disease. The crisis stems from a long retreat: the Left has abandoned its foundational ground — work, wages, housing, public services, social protection, democratic sovereignty — and replaced it with something else. Depending on the case: adaptation to the system, a revived anti-Westernism, or the woke language of recognition.

The Establishment Democratic Party
The Democratic Party (PD) long ago ceased to be a popular party and became the political guarantor of compatibility: with technocratic Europe, with Atlanticism turned into an automatic reflex, with liberal-globalized capitalism, and with a form of modernization that has too often asked the popular classes to adapt to their own marginalization.

The PD belongs fully to this trajectory: it does not correct it; it embodies it. It represents one of its most accomplished forms — institutional, urban, educated, perfectly integrated into an order it once should have questioned. It speaks the language of rights, Europe, innovation, inclusion, sustainability. Often, these are the right words; the problem is who speaks them, from where, and to whom they appear to be addressed.

The PD struggles to be perceived as the party of those who work, those who are losing income, those who live on the outskirts, those who cannot afford rent, those who look at the ecological transition and see a cost before they see a promise. Its modernity too often coincides with the point of view of those who already possess the tools to navigate it.

Here lies the crack within the PD: it has turned governability into an identity, and responsibility into prior acceptance of existing constraints. It has ended up treating the system as the natural horizon within which to demonstrate reliability, rather than as a field to be questioned. In this passage, it has lost its connection with social conflict, with material life, with that part of the country that is not asking to be educated into modernity, but to avoid being crushed by it.

The Protest Without a Project
Around the PD, and often against it, move various parties, movements, and intellectuals — from Alessandro Di Battista and his association Schierarsi, to the Agorà movement of Angelo D’Orsi, and Maurizio Acerbo’s Rifondazione Comunista — who claim to represent an alternative, yet end up repeating an old repertoire: left-wing sovereigntism, campist nostalgia, the street against Parliament, the West as original sin.

The radical Left sees the distance between the PD and the popular classes, denounces it, and yet fails to bridge it. It intercepts real anger and translates it into an old language. It mistakes protest for representation, the street for the people, anti-Westernism for autonomy. Even when it touches genuine hardship, it drags it back into a political imagination that belongs more to the last century than to Italy today.

Here we are back in the twentieth century.

The Agorà movement of Angelo D’Orsi, founded in 2026, states its position clearly: withdrawal from NATO and the European Union, renewed relations with Russia, a rupture with Israel. These positions revive an old mental map: a world divided into camps, with Western imperialism on one side and those who oppose it on the other. Within this logic, the political nature of the actors matters little; what matters is where they stand in the global confrontation.

Di Battista, too, with a certainly significant ability to mobilize popular sentiment, moves along a similar path: criticism of rearmament, energy sovereigntism, opposition to Atlanticism, and distrust of Europe as an external constraint. It is a Left that wants to be radical and often remains nailed to a merely oppositional radicalism, far more capable of saying whom it stands against than what it would govern for.

Its vocabulary seems new only on the surface. In reality, it repeats an old pattern: the West as the origin of political evil, America as a corrupting power, Israel as a colonial outpost, Russia as a necessary interlocutor because it is hostile to the Atlantic order. The streets become the authentic site of popular will; institutions, a cage. It is Cold War campism that outlived the camps themselves.

Selective Anti-Fascism and the Blind Spot on Israel
Within this framework, the question of anti-fascism reveals all the ambiguity of the discourse. When it becomes an elastic category, it loses precision: it can be brandished against every domestic adversary and then suspended when tactical convergences prove useful; it can be invoked against the governing Right and suddenly become more tolerant toward milieus, languages, or interlocutors that would once have been considered untouchable.

It is striking to see part of the Left cry fascism at every move of the Italian Right, while minimizing the ambiguities of its own fellow travelers. Incompatible political cultures become acceptable if they share the same target: Atlanticism, Israel, the West, liberalism, parliamentary democracy treated as a mask for domination. Anti-fascism, in this way, ceases to be historical memory and constitutional culture, and becomes an instrument of selective delegitimization.

It is precisely here that a terrain opens up which the Left struggles to name: contemporary antisemitism, often disguised as radical anti-Zionism. Criticism of Israel fully belongs within political discourse; the demonization of Israel is something else entirely. When the Jewish state becomes the embodiment of all evil, the boundary between anti-Zionism and antisemitism grows so thin as to almost disappear. At that point, very different languages can meet: the institutional Left, radical protest movements, Islamist cultures, fringes of the red-brown milieu. Di Battista’s trajectory also says something in this respect: a political biography born outside the classical history of the Left can be accepted, provided it converges on the right target. Anti-fascism remains rigid toward the domestic adversary, and becomes far more accommodating when hostility toward Israel enables new symbolic alliances.

This choice says a great deal. The Left’s identity is too often built in the negative: against the West, against capitalism, against eternal fascism, against Israel, against Atlanticism, against technocratic Europe. A political project, however, cannot live on adversaries alone; sooner or later it must say what it wants: what kind of state, what kind of work, what kind of school, what form of social protection, what idea of democratic sovereignty.

The crisis of the radical Left thus intersects with that of the liberal Left. The former remains nailed to the twentieth century; the latter surrenders to the language of the present in its most fragile form — identitarian, symbolic, performative. One still looks at the world through geopolitical camps; the other turns politics into a permanent pedagogy of language.

Wokism as Substitute Politics
The Left has progressively lost sight of the social question. While workers, employees, precarious self-employed people, young people in insecure jobs, and impoverished middle classes struggle with low wages, impossible rents, the cost of living, poor work, and neighborhoods without services, a significant part of the cultural Left has shifted the center of discourse elsewhere: identity, representation, gender, privilege, offense, recognition.

A democratic society must also attend to symbolic forms of exclusion. The way a community names, represents, and recognizes its members matters; but when recognition becomes a substitute for material politics, the Left stops speaking to the real country and begins speaking mainly to its own reference worlds: universities, media, activist circuits, educated urban classes.

The pronoun is only the symptom. The crucial point is the substitution of social conflict with the permanent surveillance of language: work is organized less and less, while discourse is corrected more and more; vocabulary becomes the battlefield, while material power disappears from view. Political belonging is produced less and less, while it is increasingly established who has the right to speak and under what conditions.

Wokism, in this sense, is far more than a catalogue of cultural battles imported from the Anglo-American world. It is a device of symbolic power: it defines the perimeter of what can be said, assigns credibility, builds hierarchies, establishes who may be listened to and who must be re-educated. The Left that surrenders to this logic ends up appearing both severe and powerless, inflexible on codes and uncertain about power relations, ready to judge words and incapable of affecting material conditions.

From here comes the fracture with the people the Left still claims to represent. The historical proletariat, and with it a growing portion of the popular and middle classes, struggles to recognize itself in a discourse perceived as elitist, abstract, and accusatory. A certain Left dismisses this gap as cultural backwardness, but that is a convenient mistake: that world finds less and less, in that language, an answer to its own life.

The result is a split Left. The PD governs, or aspires to govern, within the rules of the European game, often accepting its constraints as a natural horizon. The oppositional Left proposes a vague, nostalgic, minority left-wing sovereigntism, more effective at denouncing the system than at building a credible alternative. In between lies a political culture that has turned conflict into identity and politics into recognition.

All these roads lead to defeat.

The Italian Left would need a cultural refoundation before a political one. It would need to leave the twentieth century without taking refuge in the postmodern. It would need to criticize the errors of Atlanticism without becoming indulgent toward Putin or toward every anti-Western force. It would need to defend democratic sovereignty without sliding into isolationism. It would need to return to a few elementary and decisive things: wages, housing, schools, healthcare, work.

Above all, it would need to distinguish again between symbols and power. Symbols matter, but they are not enough; language matters, but it does not replace wages; recognition matters, but it does not pay rent. Anti-fascism matters, but it loses force when it is turned into an indiscriminate weapon, applied to every adversary and suspended before the tactical friends of the moment.

To be on the Left, in twenty-first-century Italy, should mean building a new relationship among social justice, democratic sovereignty, individual liberty, collective security, and national belonging. It means speaking to a country that is aging, growing poorer, losing industrial and international weight, watching its young people leave and its territories empty out. It means recognizing that politics reduced to compatibility with the system, nostalgia for the anti-Western camp, or the mere administration of recognition loses its historical function.

As long as it remains trapped in these patterns — twentieth-century campism, identitarian wokism, radical anti-Zionism as a convenient shelter for incoherence — the Left will continue to fragment, to speak to itself, to mistake defeat for testimony. This internal war does not produce opposition; it produces irrelevance. And meanwhile the country is left without a Left capable of naming its real fractures.