Italy’s main opposition party, the Partito Democratico (PD) went to the polls on Sunday to elect its new leader. In office from 2013 to 2018, it slumped to under 19 percent in last March’s general election. Yet even as the party promises resistance to the hard-right Lega in government, today the Democrats’ continued existence is in doubt.

Based on the old Communist and Christian-Democratic parties, the PD founded in 2007 expressed the hollowing out of the Left in favor of a new centrist project. Its recent spell in government saw it unite even with Silvio Berlusconi, as the eclectic Five Star Movement (M5S) surfed the wave of revolt against the established parties.

Pushed into opposition as M5S and Lega formed a government in June 2018, some leading figures in the PD have called for the party to be replaced with a catch-all “anti-populist” and pro-European vehicle, integrating parts of the center-right. Yet there are also those who hope to rediscover the PD’s former social-democratic identity.