Founded 25 November 2015 | ||
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Ideology Christian democracySocial conservatismConservative liberalism | ||
Identity and Action (Italian: Identità e Azione, IdeA), also known as IdeA Movement (Movimento IdeA), is a conservative political party in Italy, whose membership stretches from Christian democracy to conservative liberalism.
The party's leader is Gaetano Quagliariello, a former minister of Institutional Reforms.
IdeA allows "double membership", meaning that its members can also be members of other parties.
History
The party was formed as a "movement" on 25 November 2015 by a group of splinters from the New Centre-Right (NCD), a centre-right party which was then part of government led by Matteo Renzi, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
Two deputies (Vincenzo Piso and Eugenia Roccella) and four senators (Andrea Augello, Luigi Compagna, Carlo Giovanardi and Gaetano Quagliariello) left the NCD because they no longer supported its alliance with the PD. They were joined by two deputies, Guglielmo Vaccaro (ex-PD, later Unique Italy–IU) and Renata Bueno (South American Union Italian Emigrants–USEI), and several regional politicians, including Davide Bellomo (independent, Apulia), Stefano Casali (Tosi List for Veneto, Veneto), Gianni Chiodi (independent, former President of Abruzzo) and Vittoriano Solazzi (Marche 2020, Marche).
Since its foundation, IdeA aimed at being part of a larger centre-right coalition: Lelio Alfonso and Pino Bicchielli of IU and Maurizio Gasparri of Forza Italia (FI) attended to the party's first press conference, and there were also rumors that Quagliarello's group might soon join forces with Raffaele Fitto's Conservatives and Reformists (CR), Flavio Tosi's Act! (F!) and Mario Mauro's Populars for Italy (PpI): such an alliance could boast more than 20 deputies and 15 senators.
The party established a particularly close relationship with IU: in the Senate Quagliariello became its speaker (while being also IdeA's leader) and the two parties are supposed to merge soon. In the meantime, the four deputies of IdeA, along with Aniello Formisano of Italy of Values (IdV, a party which had long been part of centre-left coalitions), formed a sub-group, named after the USEI (and, later, "USEI–IdeA"), within the Mixed Group of the Chamber, while the party's four senators joined the heterogeneous Great Autonomies and Freedom (GAL) group, which included also the PpI.