Piazza Grande is a social-democratic and progressive faction within the Democratic Party (PD), a political party in Italy. Its leader is Nicola Zingaretti, President of Lazio region from 2013 to 2022 and former leader of the PD. He is considered a social democrat and one of the most prominent members of the party's left-wing.[1] Piazza Grande's members are also known as Zingarettiani from the name of their leader.[2]
On 4 March 2018, Zingaretti was narrowly re-elected president with 1,018,736 votes (32.9%), defeating the centre-right candidate Stefano Parisi (31.2%) and the Five Star's Roberta Lombardi (27%). Despite the small margin of victory, Zingaretti's win was seen as a strong showing due to the poor electoral result of the centre-left coalition in the general election which was held in the same day.[7][8] After the election defeat, the Democratic leader, Matteo Renzi, resigned from secretary, his deputy Maurizio Martina started functioning as acting secretary and a new leadership election was called for early 2019.[9][10][11] On 7 July 2018, Nicola Zingaretti announced his intention to run as new party's leader.[12][13]
In August 2018, Zingaretti launched the political convention in support of his candidacy, named Piazza Grande, which was held in Rome in October.[14] Zingaretti's campaign was based on a social democratic platform, whose aim was to abandon the social liberal and centrist policies promoted by Matteo Renzi and to move the Democratic Party more on the left.[15] The campaign's main themes were social justice and fight to economic inequality.[16]
