VERBANIA, Italy — Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, has been traversing Italy in a white camper for two months, delivering rousing speeches with a bit of American-style campaigning, as he competes in a primary to decide who will lead Italy’s center-left Democratic Party in national elections next year.
His campaign slogan, “Adesso” (Now), seems borrowed from the Obama handbook, his campaign colors are the same as the American flag, and he makes a point of addressing crowds in a jacketless, chummy manner, in vivid contrast to Italy’s more declamatory tradition.
But it is not just Mr. Renzi’s youthful campaign style that is stirring up his party — and by extension, Italian politics. It is his message for “rottamazione” — which translates as scrapping, and is most often used when consigning a car to the junk heap.
That, Mr. Renzi proclaims, is what he would like to do to the political class that led Italy into its current economic morass, while rejuvenating his own party, which now has a strong chance to win power in national elections next spring, given the disarray that has troubled the conservative party of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Mr. Renzi’s message is meant especially for disaffected young people, and taps a widespread contempt for politicians, who are perceived more than ever as corrupt, overprivileged and out of touch with a struggling nation.
But his campaign has also strongly offended the traditions of many in the left, which he wants to move toward the models of “Blair, Clinton and Obama,” as he put it in a recent interview in his office in Florence City Hall, meaning he wants to move his party more to the center.
But the prospect of Mr. Renzi winning the primary, whose first round of voting is set for Sunday, has many fellow party members worried that he would drastically shift the core values of the party away from its roots — it is the largest remaining heir to Italy’s once influential Communist Party — and risk opening an irreparable rift within its ranks.
Mr. Renzi argues that it is needed to save a party that grew rigid and ossified and lost influence in two decades of dominance by Mr. Berlusconi and his conservatives.
“His action is one of renewal — not from within the party, but despite the party,” said Diego Bianchi, a center-left political blogger, in a telephone interview. He and other critics of Mr. Renzi say he has remained on the fringes of the party machine rather than take part in internal debates. “He has personalized the notion of leadership in a very showy way,” he added. “He gives off the sensation that he has his own story at heart, and that he has little to do with the history of the left.”
Mr. Renzi has unsettled matters further by appealing to Mr. Berlusconi’s disillusioned voters to turn to the left in the next election. Many in his own party look with suspicion at Mr. Renzi’s lengthening list of endorsements from conservatives.
In Mr. Berlusconi’s paper Il Giornale, deputy editor Giuseppe de Bellis said Saturday that Mr. Renzi was “the first possible center-left leader that we like.”
Mr. Renzi’s supporters say he is trying to open up new, less ideological horizons at a fluid moment. “The exit of Berlusconi frees up a river of centrist electors,” said Antonio Funiciello, a Democratic Party member. “I think our party should reflect on this, especially in the north. This clutching onto the old certainties of the left closes us off toward electors that could be open to a new government project.
“It’s a high-risk move,” he added, “but with a high return.”
Mr. Renzi wants to appeal to young Italians whose job prospects have evaporated and who are hostage to the generational imbalance in Italy, where a gerontocracy holds the reins of power in politics, business and higher education.
One Monday this month, Mr. Renzi bounded onto a stage in Verbania, in the Piedmont region, to the strains of the pop song “We Are Young,” by Fun.
Stirring Up Stodgy Italy With His Political Style http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-89EKCgBk8MZdE.gif
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