Antonio Maíllo, elected new leader of IU, often refers to the case of Italy in his political analyses. He also does it when he tries hard to explain his project to some of his colleagues, especially to those most skeptical of the confluence processes, a word that today arouses suspicion within Izquierda Unida. “We must avoid the scenario of the left in Italy. We are on time,” he wrote in X in April, shortly before confirming his candidacy for IU leadership. On Tuesday, after being elected to office with 53.4% of the votes, he insisted in an interview with El PAÍS on the risk of “Italianization” and “a disjointed left.” So at the IU assembly to be held this weekend in Madrid, Maíllo will become general coordinator of the federation with the set idea of avoiding the self-destructive errors of the Italian left since the 1990s. And with a model to follow, which in his opinion represents a total contrast to the Italian case: the Comisiones Obreras union.
Although he resigned as IU coordinator in Andalusia in 2019 to return to teaching high school classes, Maíllo has never lost sight of IU life. Not only has he maintained informal contact, but since the previous assembly, in 2021, he has been part of the collegiate management, the body for the daily management of IU, although without a specific area assigned. However, he did not have a return to the front line in mind until he observed how a “temptation to retreat” was emerging in IU, explains a leader close to the new leader. That is when he decides to step forward for what he calls an “ethical duty” and when his warning about what happened in Italy gains in insistence, he adds.
But why so alert about “Italianization”? The PCI, founded among others by Antonio Gramsci, was after the end of the Second World War and for decades a reference for its peers in the West. Not only because of its militancy, which exceeded two million cards, but because of its social porosity and cultural influence. In 1984, only 40 years ago, it became the party with the most votes in Italy in a national election, in this case the European ones, in a day celebrated under the shock of the death of the historic leader Enrico Berlinguer. Then everything fell apart very quickly. In 1991, as a result of a little debated theorization after the fall of the Berlin Wall according to which the word “communist” itself was cursed, the PCI dissolved.
Since then everything has been division, foundations and refoundations, dissolutions and nostalgia. The Democratic Party of the Left led by Achille Occhetto, the main person responsible for the dissolution of the PCI, was supposed to serve as a refuge for the bulk of the communists, but it failed. It ended up transformed into Left Democrats, merged with a diverse menu of movements and currents. There were PCI militants who opted from the beginning for the Communist Refoundation, which is irrelevant today. Over time, many ended up in the Democratic Party (PD), a heterogeneous formation founded in 2007 and which continues to be the main reference of the center-left. On its left side, multiple forces have been born over the years, dispersed and of little influence, which have ended up closing, living poorly or integrating into the PD.
“If you ask on the street today which party is running to the left of the Democratic Party, the vast majority have no idea. It’s impossible to follow. And that in a country in which the PCI was almost everything,” says Andrea Donofrio, professor of History of Political Thought at the Complutense University, specialized in Italian politics. The result, he adds, is greater progressive abstentionism. “There is an entire left-wing electorate that is apathetic and disillusioned, orphaned,” he analyzes.
To Jaime Bordel, co-author of Salvini & Meloni. Children of the same rage, who knows transalpine politics in depth, the fears of the IU leader seem “logical”, especially because for the Spanish communists of his generation – Maíllo was born in 1966 – the dissolution of the PCI and the subsequent “disaster” represented “a collective trauma.” “His words should sound like a warning of what can happen to a left that was much higher than the PCE ever reached, with a PCI that was the backbone of society, and that due to bad decisions and confrontations has been left without references. , mired in demoralization, confusion and self-referentiality. Today it is a left in which the majority has leaned toward a movement without institutional aspirations,” he summarizes.
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Maíllo, who maintains that he will finish the current academic year as a teacher, has prevailed in the primaries against three candidates. The main opponent has been Sira Rego, Minister of Youth and Children (23.4%). Behind them were the IU coordinator in Madrid, Álvaro Aguilera (14.1%), and the member of the federal coordinator José Antonio García Rubio (8.3%). Maíllo’s victory, with 4,463 votes, is clear but not overwhelming: between support from his rivals and blank votes, they are close to half. The vote has served to elect the first 80 members of the federal coordinator, a majority of whom will ratify Maíllo on Sunday. Amendments to the political document who received more support, The left that was, is and will be. The final text will define IU’s strategy.
Maíllo is guaranteed leadership, but not calm. In the organization there is discontent over what is judged to be a lack of prominence by IU in Sumar, both in the distribution of responsibilities in Congress and in the European list, where Manu Pineda has gone to number four. With these starting conditions, what will the political action of the new coordinator translate into to avoid “Italianization”?
In the opinion of the aforementioned leader, the new coordinator must “overcome the internal suspicion towards confluences or even the temptations to go it alone again that exists in part of IU as a result of the end of Unidas Podemos and the problems in Sumar.” And at the same time he has to promote “a change in the way Sumar works,” which better accommodates organizations, he adds. “Not only to IU, but to us too,” he concludes, rejecting the “caricature” according to the “IU is going to dissolve into Sumar” and remembering that Maíllo has been a member of IU since its origin in 1986.
Another leader close to Maíllo sees his words about Italy as a message “inward” and another “outward.” The first, in IU, is “against the temptation of isolation”; the second, for the entire space, “against platform parties and without roots, against haste and lack of consistency in projects.” “There are certain mantras of the new politics that must be overcome,” he believes.
At the doors of the assembly, Maíllo avoids any message that may seem directed against anyone, inside or outside IU. “I highlight the risk of fragmentation, the cause of which is a neoliberal inoculation in our own organizations that pushes towards individualism over the collective, when we have a very high percentage of ideas in common,” explains Maíllo, who feels part of a generation of communists marked by the death of the PCI and does not fail to remember that Italy demonstrates that the irreversible defeat of the alternative left is not an inconceivable hypothesis.
Faced with this Italian “countermodel”, the elected coordinator gives CC OO as an example to follow: “Si Commissions is the largest social organization in Spain, with more than a million members, it is because of its plurality, because it is united, because whoever loses in a congress does not leave and set up another union, because whoever wins knows how to be the majority and whoever loses is the minority. Without that, Commissions would not have the social strength and political impact that it has.” Maíllo aspires to that for IU and for his fellow travelers, although he is aware that he is not the first to set that goal.
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