Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Palmiro Togliatti famously described his party’s combination of Bolshevik tradition and Italian patriotism as like the body of a giraffe: oddly shaped yet functional to a certain purpose. After the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1991, the unusual creature of the PCI went on to give birth to a series of center-left projects ultimately culminating in today’s Democratic Party (PD). Yet the purpose of the PD, which itself represents a combination of post-Communist identity and pro-European liberalism, is today far from clear.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, whose hard-right Lega now governs Italy in coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), likes to claim that “the Left” has been in power for two decades. In fact, the PD and its predecessors were in office for just half that time, often allied to center-right forces. But the self-described “center-left” PD certainly did become an establishment force. Founded in 2007 at the end of a series of mergers, the PD combined the old PCI’s embrace of republican institutions with an orientation to Italian business elites and the European project.

Lost in this process was the Left’s traditional base, which was already victim to a decade of crisis and a quarter-century of stagnation. Both March’s general election (in which the PD slumped to 19 percent) and subsequent local contests have illustrated the demise of the old red fortresses.