Rifondazione Comunista tries to expel anti-war senator

I’ll be writing something a bit more detailed about the fall of the Prodi government for the next issue of Socialist Resistance but I came across this appeal at Sinistra Critica’s site. It’s in Italian but if you read Latin, French or Spanish you should be able to get the gist. If you want to…

Liam

February 25, 2007

1–2 minutes

Italy

The appeal says that Rifondazione’s leadership has decided that Franco Turigliatto is no longer able to be a member of the party because of his decision not to support the government’s policy of keeping Italian troops in Afghanistan. Turigliatto abstained which hardly puts him in the Karl Liebknecht league but it was enough to bring down the government.

Sinsistra Critica is a current on the left of Rifondazione in which Turigliatto and other Italian supporters of the Fourth International are active. They say that his decision to abstain is in keeping with Rifondazione’s historic programme and reflects the mood of Italy’s large peace movement. They add that he has also offered to resign from the senate and contrast this to the bunch of corrupt, careerist scumbags littering the Italian parliament and senate. I’m translating rather loosely.

I’ll add more to this soonish.

2 responses to “Rifondazione Comunista tries to expel anti-war senator”

Dave A

February 25, 2007 at 2:35 pm

The moves to expel Turigliatto from Rifondizione (PRC) are a measure of the PRC leadership’s determination to stay within Prodi’s coalition, even at the cost of being bound ever more tightly to supporting Prodi’s neo-liberal programme.The other PRC Senator who abstained in the vote this week on the government’s foreign policy was Fernando Rossi, who is also a supporter of the United Secretariat Fourth International.Rossi is now backtracking, saying: “Maybe if I knew my vote was so fundamental, I would have reflected a bit”. Presumably there is still the possibility that the PRC leadership will also try to discipline Rossi.Liam is right that the actions of Turigliatto hardly put him in the Liebknecht league. The same goes for Rossi. Liam’s translation of the Sinistra Critica statement is not so much loose, as putting the parliamentary language of the original statement into the more accurate terms which would be used among the 70,000 who took to the streets of Vicenza last weekend to protest against Prodi’s militarist agenda.I think that the appeal to support Turigliatto should be supported while making such criticisms. The same for Rossi if he is disciplined. The discipline is not just aimed at two individuals, but also against anyone on the Italian left who stands more wholeheartedly for real working class resistance to neo-liberalism.An English version of the appeal in support of Turigliatto is available on the International Viewpoint website at: http://tinyurl.com/2m8syb

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Dave A

February 26, 2007 at 3:33 pm

Factual correction to my previous comment: Rossi is not a supporter of the United Secretariat, but seems to be a left-wing maverick.He was elected to the Senate as a member of the PdCI (Communist Party of Italy) which split to the right from Rifondazione in 1998 over support for Prodi’s Olive Tree coalition. He was then expelled from the PdCI some time before the current crisis for an interview he gave to an Italian paper, and is now a member of the Consumers Unity party!This all goes to reinforce the basic point: the parliamentary reflection of the mass opposition in Italy to the troops in Afghanistan and the new US airbase has been pathetic; Rifondazione’s strategy of being “protest party and a government party” inevitably leads to betrayal.

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Liam redux