What really happened between Conte and Mattarella. Damato’s Scratches
I try to count, I fear incomplete, of the small steps that Sergio Mattarella as a good believer made from at least October until the intervention he had to carry out on the commissioning policy, as complained by the parts of the manifesto, with recourse to Mario Draghi to end the government crisis.
The first foil was the silence opposite in the autumn to the attempts by the Prime Minister to apply the Quirinal’s advice to involve the opposition in the management of the various emergencies that overlapped after the summer: pandemic, social, economic and financial. , as Mattarella himself reiterated in the face of the negative outcome of the exploration entrusted to the Speaker of the Chamber. Instead of involving them, Conte immediately tried to divide the oppositions, thinking of the advantages that could derive from it within the Democratic Party, where there were more or less explicit tendencies to involve Silvio Berlusconi in a useful game to protect himself from the first signs of intolerance of Matteo Renzi.
The second foil was also a silence: the one opposed by Mattarella, as if he had not noticed it, to Conte’s attempt to manage with very ease the unwanted verification of the majority at the end imposed on him by Renzi with a certain vivacity and by the Pd with less force. . Meetings of politicians and experts were as frequent as they were useless, and in the end not even more frequent.
The third foil was the signature affixed without any grievance in seeing the state budget arrive on the desk a few hours after the deadline to avoid recourse to the provisional exercise: legitimate, for charity, as noted by constitutionalists of the front row, but harmful in the financial markets. Where the vultures never rest in their speculations.
Mattarella’s fourth foil was that, I don’t know frankly if explicitly requested by the government, the Democratic Party or by others or just guessed as they need by the President of the Republic, to credit the Quirinale’s willingness to face a possible crisis that is too bumpy by resorting to the dissolution of the Houses and early elections. This actually worked for a while as a deterrent in favor of Conte and his search for “responsible, pro-European, willing” senators and anything else with which to replace the Renzians in the majority, especially in the Senate. Where the “italoviventi”, from the name of Renzi’s party, were and have remained decisive even in the vote of confidence sought by Conte after the resignation of the two faithful ministers of the former mayor of Florence.
The fifth foil of the head of state was precisely that of allowing Conte, once the two Renzian ministers were lost, not to resign and to try to “asphalt” in the hall of Palazzo Madama – word attributed to spokesman Rocco Casalino, although later denied – the now too uncomfortable party of Renzi.
The sixth and last foil, at least in my list that – I repeat – could be incomplete, Mattarella did so by granting the Giallorossi majority, now also formally in open crisis, the extra time of the exploratory mandate to the Speaker of the House. That he was not able, even he, to contain the comrades of the party or movement, that is the grillini. In fact, put at the common table with the others to try a programmatic understanding, they have rethought the promise of the regent Vito Crimi to postpone the “divisive” issues, reducing them to the sole use of European funding to strengthen the health service. And then they put up barricades when others raised the issues of, for example, justice and too expensive citizenship income.
When he collected Fico’s report on his exploration Mattarella and blurted out how only patients can do, practically closing the game with the full and fiduciary assignment to Draghi for a “high profile” government, well beyond the formulas and alignments formed in this anomalous eighteenth term. At the halfway point of which two majorities of opposite sign have already been burned.
Under normal conditions we would have returned to the polls, but Mattarella explained in a wealth of arguments the exceptional nature of these times. And, even at the cost of being accused by those of the Fatto Quotidiano of “denying the vote always evoked”, he preferred to bet on the responsibility of the current Chambers, whose forces represented he asked to trust the Conte government. On the other hand, article 88 of the Constitution entrusts the feasibility of early elections to the sole and unquestionable evaluation of the President of the Republic.
