Articles:
´How to Be Like Tony Blair´ Five Good Advice to Matteo Renzi

So the whole world now knows what
Italians have known for years: that Matteo Renzi fancies himself as
Italy’s Tony Blair. Presumably, what Renzi has in mind is not
today’s Blair as globe-trotting multi-millionaire adviser to the
J.P. Morgan bank and to Central Asian dictators but rather the man
who ended what Renzi calls “his party’s tradition of losing
elections” and became Britain’s youngest prime minister for 200
years. But what does this actually mean?

When Blair was elected leader of his
Labour party in 1994, at the age of 40, many people thought that
although he was clearly a great communicator, he was nevertheless too
superficial, too lightweight, too inexperienced to really succeed.
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Clearly, by becoming the most
successful Labour leader ever, winning three successive elections, he
proved the doubters wrong—even if he later won plenty of enemies
too. So here is a five-point plan for how to be Italy’s Blair.

Renzi has already carried out the
first: capture your party, don’t pretend you can just win by
being a TV personality. Everyone needs a base, an organization. To
emulate Blair, he now needs to add a further characteristic:
patience. It wasn’t directly Blair’s choice, but after becoming
leader he then had three years in which to consolidate his grip on
his party, to build a strong team, and to make a proper plan for
winning elections.

Which leads to the second point: hire
a really sharp communicator, even if you think you are brilliant
yourself. You cannot be a one-man-band. Communication is a
24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job, which needs more than just flair
and talent: it needs skill, experience, planning and dedication. That
is what Blair got when he hired Alastair Campbell, a former tabloid
journalist.

What a true professional will then
advise is point three: do your research, and do it nationwide.
Don’t just go to public meetings in piazzas and talk to your
adoring fans. You must use all the techniques of modern market
research to find out what voters are worried about, what voters want,
and what voters think of your messages. Someone like Renzi has a
great instinct for this, as did Blair. But instinct isn’t enough.

So in 1994-97 Blair, Campbell and
their great campaign guru, Peter (now Lord) Mandelson, annoyed the
old Labour dinosaurs by becoming like advertising men, using surveys
and “focus groups” all over the country to find out what people
were thinking. Nowadays they would also be analyzing the “big data”
of all kinds that is available.

Their aim was one they learned from
their own role model, President Bill Clinton. He had showed that the
way to win was not to appeal just to your traditional supporters,
especially in the modern, post-ideological age. You should appeal
to all kinds of voters, not just the old left. That is point
four.

Blair’s motto was that Labour must
win the support not just of the poor and the working class, but also
of the 60% of the British population who owned their own houses, who
earned average wages, who lived in affluent areas. Clinton,
especially after his heavy defeat in Congressional elections in 1994,
coined a term, “triangulation”, which means finding ways to build
consensus even with your opponents. Blair called his approach “the
third way”, neither left nor right. Gerhard Schroeder, the
successful Social Democrat Chancellor in Germany from 1998-2005, who
is today credited with the reforms that have made his country
Europe’s strongest, called it the “neue mitte”, the new
centre.

Old supporters will call you a
traitor. And in some ways you will be, for if you are to succeed you
will need to be a liberalizer, freeing up markets and accepting that
only private businesses can create jobs today in Italy. Moreover,
like Schroeder, you will want to reform labour laws. So point five is
that to be like Blair you will also need a big, meaningful policy,
ready to be implemented as soon as you win office, to reassure that
you also care about the poor and vulnerable. Blair’s was a
national minimum wage introduced in 1998, the first Britain had ever
had. What will yours be, Matteo?