These are days of rhetoric, and it is inevitable.
After all, it has always been like this.
As Emma Bonino recalled at Marco Pannella’s funeral: mocked and laughed at while alive, celebrated across the board when dead.
And perhaps this is not an absolute evil either. Commemorations, even when they are full of rhetoric, can at least serve to relaunch reflections and battles.

The writer belongs to the first generation that never met Marco Pannella.
We met him as kids on YouTube and on Radio Radicale. This is how we approached that strange and crazy Radical world: out of an obstinate passion, perhaps even obsession.
A politics that was often minority, sometimes self-defeating, but capable of using the tools of non-violence so powerfully that it changed this country.

As teenagers, on the screens of our telephones, we watched people willing to go to jail, to consume themselves in endless hunger and thirst strikes. But above all, we watched people who did it without pursuing consensus or personal visibility. They were doing it for the love of the rule of law, to defend rights that nobody wanted to defend.

For some this is almost normal, for us it is not.
It was the spark that brought us closer to the Radicals in one of the most difficult moments of their history.
Not so much for the sanctification of a man who revolutionised Italian politics but who, inevitably, also had many limitations. We approached him for something that went beyond politics itself: the ability to be on the side of the last, of prisoners, drug addicts, the marginalised.

The ability to transform personal stories of pain and suffering into collective struggles capable of changing the lives of millions of people.

So, we never knew Marco, but we have learnt to recognise him.
And not only in politics and method, but above all in people’s words and eyes. Marco is in the overwhelming emotion, in the lucid eyes, in the inner fire in the face of injustice. A fire that, however, has nothing to do with a feeling of hatred, but which arises from an overwhelming love for the different, the last, the unknown, the Right.

It is from a private and individual fact, from love that becomes political, that those blue eyes are found.

But today, ten years after his death, one bitterness remains above all: those ‘insurmountable solitudes’, of which Pannella often spoke, have returned.
Solitudes that so many generations of Radicals had managed to cross together, giving substance to their battles, escaping the circuits of violence and conformism and managing to channel that feeling.
The feeling of an intransigent love, which does not stand by, which is never indifferent, which raises its voice, which is willing to lose everything, in order to assert its own reasons as well.

That political method is sorely lacking: there is a lack of a politics made up of hours of real debates, of bitter clashes that were nonetheless aimed at meeting. What is missing is a politics capable of dictating the agenda, instead of obsessively chasing the fears and trends of the moment. What is missing is the ability to pay a personal price for what one believes in, the courage to be unpopular. There is a lack of rejection of the obsession with power.

The Radicals, and Pannella first, made mistakes. And some consequences we are all paying for today. Among these is precisely the return of that feeling of loneliness that has turned into anguish.
And it is perhaps from here that we should start again: when the inaugurations of streets and gardens come to an end, there should remain more than the ritual memory of a few anniversaries.

Ten years after Marco Pannella’s death, and the transformation of the radical galaxy into a dispersed dust cloud, the strongest thing we can do is to identify – despite the differences – battles to be fought together, willing to put action before the many divisions.

We have too great a history, too precious a heritage of ideas, and too many battles still open to allow ourselves the luxury of leaving alone those who continue to believe that the world is not changed by chasing the positioning of the moment, but by having the courage to go through even unpopularity.

We continue to believe in that method. In a secular way, certainly. But with that same fire inside that is much more than mere politics, and that has animated us since we were 15 years old when we read about Pannella and the Radicals.

Marco is missing. We would have liked to meet him, listen to him live, discuss with him, ask him to account for so many victories and so many mistakes. But what is most missing today is the ability to share stretches of road together on the essential things.

And this is perhaps the best way to remember him: not with secular holy cards, but by going back to using non-violence together to keep those struggles alive.

We are ready to be hope and to bear witness to that love, but the responsibility on our shoulders today is enormous. History will tell us if we have lived up to it.

Filippo Blengino is secretary of Radicali Italiani. Bianca Piscolla is a member of the Executive.