Ideology
The Democratic Party is a big tent centre-left party, strongly influenced by the ideas of social democracy and the Christian left. The common roots of the founding components of the party reside in the Italian resistance movement, the writing of Italian Constitution and the Historic compromise, all three events which saw the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (the two major forerunners of Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy and the Democrats of the Left, respectively) cooperate. The United States Democratic Party and American liberalism are also an important source of inspiration.
The party stresses national and social cohesion, green issues, social progressivism, progressive taxation and Europeanism. In this respect the party's precursors strongly supported the need of balancing budgets in order to comply to Maastricht criteria. Under the leadership of Veltroni, the party took a strong stance in favour of constitutional reform and of a new electoral law, on the road toward a two-party system.
Read more about this topic: Democratic Party (Italy)
Famous quotes containing the word ideology:
“The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty—of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation.... The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.”
—V.N. (Valintin Nikolaevic)
“Commerce is greedy. Ideology is bloodthirsty.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)