Last month, nearly a year after the 2014 European elections, the “Tsipras List,” Italy’s radical left front modeled after Syriza, split. The party had registered a respectable 1.1 million votes (giving it three members of the European Parliament), but things soon soured.

Two weeks ago Barbara Spinelli, its cofounder and MEP, left the alliance. Spinelli declared that she “did not want to contribute to the umpteenth atomization of the Left.”

A founder of the newspaper La Repubblica, Spinelli was in the liberal-green wing of the Tsipras List, whose driving force comes from fragments of the now-dissolved Italian Communist Party (PCI). Many are not sad to see Spinelli go — she promised before the 2014 election not to take a seat in the European Parliament and then did so anyway, and even now after abandoning the front under which she was elected, Spinelli has clung on to her MEP post and €100,000 salary.