For three years the left has been wandering away from the Palace of Power and away from the polls. And the reasons are understandable. After Romano Prodi’s victory in 2006, the last one certified by the Ministry of the Interior, came a push against Silvio Berlusconi disguised as a spread, speculation on government bonds, Mario Monti’s rigor mortis, the “non-victory” of 2013, then a random majority that gave birth to Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi, Paolo Gentiloni, Giallorossi Giuseppe Conte and the almost bipartisan Mario Draghi. All the skeletons in the Democrats’ closet are hard to shake off, because now there’s someone creating further surprises to topple the center-right. (Also) it was these secret plots that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni referred to one evening in Padua when, while defending the premiership, she called for the need for reforms “that adequately explain the chaos, the Palace games, the government that goes beyond the limits of citizens, worthy of a modern state”.
“It is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”, John Milton once said John Milton to Satan who was cast back into the abyss of the lost Heaven. And in fact “one expects a financial storm and a social uprising to reign on the ruins, rather than an opposition in a developing country”, Meloni underlines, citing – not inappropriately – Romano Prodi, “the man who had a university leadership that ignored the Italians”, from the IRI mess to the devaluation of the lira and the mistakes of the euro and who currently still hopes for the Quirinale despite the backstabbing he received from his aides.
At the moment the Italian economy – in a complicated scenario for Western countries, with France and Germany struggling – is doing better than others, government bonds are declining and also tempting Italian savers, “last week the Financial Times itself ran the headline that Europe should learn from Italy”, recalled the leader of the Italian Brotherhood, while the left predicted that with the strength of the center-right “we will survive for six months, the scapegoat of Europe isolated at the international level”.
It is a sin to think badly, but we have seen that international assessments of Italy are often hetero-directed from the left – remember the smiles of Angela Merkel and Francois Sarkozy, the italics in foreign newspapers, Berlusconi’s unfitness to govern (copyright The Economist), the vicious assessments of international observers based only on reading Corriere and Repubblica. Today, for the fascist left, the economy is a blunt weapon, the social uprising that someone like Maurizio Landini hopes for every Friday and even Fridays only occurs (thankfully) in street clashes between students and anarchists, not “against” but simply to claim presence, to say “I am here”. And a contract renewal that gives breathing space to the middle class has been signed despite CGIL’s many difficulties. “Late communist” recipes such as patrimonial ones made people smile, while left-wing snobs “he who earns 2,500 euros is a rich man”, recalled the prime minister, who was a witness to the disconnect between the state and a political party that never managed to speak to everyone.
Who knows if the “surprise” predicted by some has the stale impression of prosecutors and prosecutors bowing to the oppositional logic that we have unfortunately seen in recent days poisoning the debate over judicial reform, from the objections to the Court of Auditors Strait Bridge to the creative jurisprudence that tries to defuse resistance to immigration. “I can’t be blackmailed”, is the prime minister’s mantra, in chats and conversations between judicial factions, the capes know this all too well.
The investigative weapons used are blunt bullets, which no longer do any harm, even those who have built careers on horrific investigations that failed in the courtroom no longer believe in justice as a political weapon. Power not only weakens those who don’t have it, but also those who know that the old shortcuts to attacking the Palace no longer work.
