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VIA 04 04/2007 REVISTA DEL CENTRE D’ESTUDIS JORDI PUJOL
also assures us that one of its leading
contributions and most genuine and evident
consequences seems to have been the
relocating of the political centre in Great
Britain, thereby also forcing a highly
significant transformation within the
Conservative Party.
Centrism in France or the Failure
of a Success
Nicolas Sauger
The establishment and adoption of a clearly
centrist strategy on the part of the UDF in
France has been progressive and its main
raison d’être, today and at the hand of François
Bayrou, is two-fold: one the one hand, to
construct an option that rejects the previous
majority-focused, bipolar logic and, on the
other hand, to have a means to attain the
presidency with their own strategy. Nicolas
Sauger, an expert on how centrism has
evolved in France, also explains the
ambivalences, the two souls, of the UDF,
expressed today in the New Centre of Hervé
Morin and in the Democratic Movement of
Bayrou himself, along with the contradictions
and internal difficulties, many of them
already present in the initial phases of this
long and tumultuous process towards
defining an autonomous centrist project. A
path that has resulted in the UDF suffering,
on a number of occasions over the last few
years, from significant desertions among its
ranks, especially towards the UMP of Jacques
Chirac, firstly, and subsequently of Nicolas
Sarkozy.
The Life, Glory, Passion, Death
–and Difficult Resurrection–
of Centrism in Italy
Alfio Mastropaolo
The process of establishing a new centre-left
force in Italy is becoming one of the dominant
factor of the post-Berlusconi era. After a
period dominated by an increase in
polarisation and dualism, the intention of the
Margherita and the DS to create the
Democratic Party is a response to an attempt,
expressed by Prodi on several occasions, to
return to the path of true political centrality.
A centrality that has its very distant roots in
the Italian case, and in which both liberal and
socialist thought, and most particularly
Christian Democrat thought, have played a
historical role and had a very decisive
influence. The fundamental reasons for this
process, therefore, do not lie in immediate
political strategy nor are they a consequence
of the needs imposed by the current electoral
system; quite the opposite, in fact. In order to
understand a number of events in modern
day Italy, and also to predict their potential
for success, we must bear in mind the
historical facts and dynamics that have
marked out the broad lines of Italian political
culture. The author of this very extensive but
necessary article explains the origins and the
complex evolution of centrist thought in Italy.
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