In 1975, just months before he was brutally murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini was sitting on a terrace in the port of Ostia, today an outlying suburb of Rome. With a magazine in hand, the Italian filmmaker ruminated over what he should write in his column for the Corriere della Sera. He noticed that the weekly he was reading only talked about “important” people, those “serious” individuals who define history. When he looked up and saw the ordinary people around him, he asked himself where these highfalutin individuals were, where they lived. His answer was striking: “An unexpected idea, a lightning flash, confronts me with words which are, I believe, not only clear but anticipate my answer: ‘They live in the Palace’.”

Pasolini concluded that for the major Italian press outlets, “Only what goes on in ‘the Palace’ seems worthy of attention and interest: all the rest is minutiae, a swarming mass, shapeless, second-rate.” Based on this insight, Pasolini wrote his article “Outside the Palace,” which the brilliant Italian describes as the place where we find (political, economic, and cultural) power, its bearers, and its many courtiers.

This allegory drawn from Pasolini is perhaps useful in explaining what is happening to the Left today, in Western Europe and in my own country, Spain. And believe me — here in the Old Continent, the radical left is living through strange times. It is in government in Spain, it has been in government in Greece, it is challenging the powers that be in France, and in Germany it constructed an opposition force. And yet . . . in each of these four countries the parties of the Left have splintered, taking us into what I venture to call “the time of splits.”