Meeting of Renzi's PD scrapped due to Spain crash

(ANSA) - Rome, March 21 - An important meeting of Premier Matteo Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party (PD) that was set to take place later on Monday has been cancelled in the wake of Sunday's bus crash in Catalonia, in which seven young Italians were killed, PD sources said. The gathering of senior PD officials had been billed as a showdown between Renzi and members of a minority hostile to many of his government's reforms and to his methods of running the party.
    The divisions are long-standing but tension has been especially high since rows over primaries this month in several Italian cities, including Rome and Naples, to select the centre-left mayor candidates for local elections in June. Recently former premier Massimo D'Alema went as far as to moot an alternative centre left to the allegedly rightwards-creeping and increasingly autocratic PD under Renzi.