THE inconclusive result of Italy’s election on March 4th has, paradoxically, foisted a decisive role on a party that emerged from the contest demoralised, defeated and divided. Though its share of the vote plunged to below 19%, its worst-ever result, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) will occupy enough seats in the new parliament to be able to put either a right-wing alliance or the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) into government. Guessing which way they will jump, though, is no easy matter.

It is a measure of the disaster that befell the party that the centre-left alliance it led came first in only one of the four regions that formerly comprised central Italy’s “red belt”. The right was victorious in Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. The M5S headed the poll in the Marche. The exception was Tuscany, the native region of the PD’s former leader, Matteo Renzi, whose resignation was accepted on March 12th at a meeting of his party’s leadership.

Florence, Tuscany’s regional capital, is a more working-class city than the tourists who come for its art and architecture might imagine. A thick belt of manufacturing industry stretches north-west from the city, which is ringed with suburbs like Coverciano, made up of low-rise apartment blocks dating from the days of Italy’s economic miracle in the 1950s and 60s. The only museum in Coverciano is devoted to football. At its social centre, named after a Communist partisan shot by the Nazis, retired factory hands rub shoulders with young men sporting hipster fashions. Few say they voted for the PD that Mr Renzi shaped after he was elected to lead it five years ago.

“At the beginning, everyone here was with him,” said Luigi Scarponi, the centre’s president. “But the PD ought to be on the side of the workers and in government Renzi did what [the right] hadn’t managed to do.” His list of the errors of Mr Renzi’s government in 2014-16 included an increase in the retirement age and a reform that abolished the right of unfairly dismissed workers to reinstatement. Both changes were explained by Italy’s need to reduce its mountainous debt and create new jobs for its young people, but both were strongly disliked by those in work. Mr Scarponi also blamed successive, PD-dominated governments for failing, until recently, to stem illegal immigration—a view party officials say is widespread in ostensibly leftist Tuscany.

The PD is the child of a marriage between mostly working-class ex-communists and mostly middle-class, progressive ex-Christian Democrats. Though a minority, it is the latter who have led each of Italy’s last three governments. Their business-friendly reforms, Mr Renzi’s autocratic ways and the objections to both from more traditional left-wingers have stretched the party’s unity to breaking point. Members of its old guard formed a rival movement, Free and Equal (LeU), last year.