On 26 October, at the Palazzo delle Stelline, Tognoli, with his book of writings, will be remembered by the Craxi Foundation. Paola Sacchi’s article
still causes us emotion and even a little disbelief at his death, so sudden, reading the book by Carlo Tognoli, without promising the moon. Writings by a Milanese reformist, edited by the Craxi Foundation (Baldini and Castoldi publisher).
He was the youngest mayor, from 1976 to 1986; the mayor of “all the Milanese”, as his lifelong friend and political leader Bettino Craxi advised him; he was the mayor of the “Milan to live” and not “to drink”, as, instead, was demonized by the communist “cousins”. A model Milan, a forerunner of the modernization of Italy, a model for how he was able to emerge first from the post-war reconstruction and then, with Tognoli, from the dark years of the terrorist tunnel.
The political and administrative model mayor of the industrial and “moral” capital of the country, the young first citizen elected a few months before Craxi al Midas in July ’76 took the reins of the PSI of De Martino, now on the road to extinction in the role of small satellite of the PCI; behold, that mayor, who was also a minister, was only a little over a year and a half ago in Hammamet. It was January 19, 2020, the twentieth anniversary of the death of the socialist statesman. Tognoli radiated intelligence from all pores, a youthful energy and even irony. It was with the delegation that he paid homage “to the leader” whose “dream was crushed in exile”. Dream, recalls Tognoli in his beautiful book, reformist and anti-communist “for the value of ideas rather than on a political level”.
Craxi, a pupil of Pietro Nenni, who, only after the death of his teacher, out of respect for him, changed the name of the component from autonomist to reformist, a minority in the PSI, is returned to us by Tognoli, in his writings, as a leader already very imaginative, and for this reason too cumbersome for the pro-PCI Orthodox, ever since he was a young councilor for the Economics of the Municipality of Milan who had the walls of the canteens of elementary schools painted. He had special diets introduced for children, because for the councilor Craxi those were not to be sad canteens for poor pupils but places for everyone.
Tognoli reminds us of Craxi’s courageous speeches at Palazzo Marino against the dangers of degeneration of ’68, up to those Saturdays with the deserted city, with the collapse of shop windows and looting. Years that culminated in the red terrorism, the BR, until the murder of Walter Togagi, the journalist of the Corriere della Sera who interviewed Tognoli just two days before he died. The mayor of all the Milanese remembers him, moved but lucid, as a journalist, a socialist, reformist intellectual, who had to be eliminated precisely because of his political nature, which stood in the way as a precious “buffer” between the old system and violence red. And for this very reason, to keep him from becoming even more influential, he was eliminated.
The value of anti-communist reformism is affirmed by Milan, in fact opposing the preferential line with the DC of a PCI in full historical compromise. Craxi and Tognoli hit the target of a socialist unity dominated by the new PSI, while governing in junctions with the PCI themselves. But they were, Tognoli recalls, the “so-called bestists”, the most open to unity on the left, over whom in Milan and not only he and Craxi exercised the leading role. In short, the famous “hegemony” of Gramscian memory overturned, at the helm of Craxi’s PSI and its new course which culminated in the “Socialist Gospel”. A path, the one that unfolds in Tognoli’s writings, with a single red thread: the landing of social democracy and Craxi’s regret that Italy was arriving later than the other European countries.
Another important mayor, Paolo Pillitteri, came from the Social Democrats who later rejoined the PSI. Then there is the administration of Milan, pragmatic, concrete, with Tognoli and Craxi guided by the principle of liberal socialism, for which it is the individual, even in a community, who must be placed at the center, as the North Star. The principle of the market, although not simply self-regulated as in the liberal formula tout court, but instead must be rebalanced with economic development for the benefit of all, starting with the poorest classes of the peripheries. With the development of Transport, Metro lines. It was Tognoli’s Milan that kicked off Craxi’s new PSI, which, a bitter irony of fate, recalls the great Milanese, it was De Martino himself who sent the last appeal to the voters on TV before the disastrous elections of ’76 . It was too late. But then Craxi gave new life and centrality to the party.
Today, 26 October, at 5.30 pm at Palazzo delle Stelline, Tognoli, with his book of writings, will be remembered by the Craxi Foundation, in a conference with the creator of the Institute in memory of her father, Senator Stefania Craxi, the president of the Margherita Boniver Foundation, Ugo Finetti and Walter Marossi. There will be the former mayor Gabriele Albertini, Flavio Caroli, Ferruccio De Bortoli, Ernesto Pellegrini and Maria Luisa Trussardi. Coordinator: Daniela Mainini, president of the Centro Studi Grande Milano. In memory of Tognoli, a mayor, with a capital S. A great Milanese. Model and lesson in times in which that role in politics, for many reasons that it would certainly be wrong to attribute all and only to the parties, must regain the centrality it had.
