What did they say in the first public meeting (which took place yesterday afternoon at Ispi) between Matteo Salvini and Enrico Letta. Paola Sacchi’s Note
Draghi effect on relations between Enrico Letta and Matteo Salvini
Differences and controversial ideas, albeit in a soft way, also given the venue, do not take long to emerge in the first public meeting (took place yesterday afternoon at Ispi chaired by Giampiero Massolo) between Matteo Salvini and Enrico Letta.
But the tones of the secretary of the Democratic Party seem to have changed compared to a certain initial impetus, evidently aimed at redesigning the perimeter of his Pd in difficulty, against the leader of the League and his alleged rate of “Europeanism”, in a unilateral offensive that went ahead for a few days.
The two certainly do not renounce to bring out their points of view, but the feeling is that certain reminders of the premier against the quarrels between the parties of the same large majority have had an effect.
The webinar meeting on the Ispi report “The world at the time of Covid, and the time of Europe
“, curated by Alessandro Colombo and Paolo Magri, and the first in which Letta and Salvini alone side by side, albeit in a virtual way. With them, in addition to Massolo, Emma Bonino and the director of Repubblica Maurizio Molinari.
There is talk of Europe, but for Salvini the point is not “more or less Europe, but which Europe”. The Northern League leader speaks of the importance of the EU on major issues but at the same time of the need not to compress national identities and peculiarities, “and this also in the interest of the EU”.
Letta underlines the need for “a Europe of health” and proposes to make “the Next generation Eu” permanent. The leader of the Democratic Party says he is happy that the League is also part of the majority that precisely because “it is so large” in his opinion it could do significant work on the issue of Europe.
He then returns to the “pro-European turn” by reintroducing the controversy with the same metaphor used on the day of his inauguration at the helm of the Nazarene. Letta observes that the Democratic Party would be “happy not to wear the clothes of the Civil Protection anymore to prevent someone from taking us out of Europe” and appreciates the “maturation of the Five Stars and the League”, he hopes, finally, the Salvini’s entry into the EPP.
Words and tones that Salvini does not like at all, who does not accept lessons from the leader of another party at his home and replies: “You cannot continue to give licenses to democracy, without taking into account the numbers expressed by the electoral results”. And then, despite a whole narrative in the mainstream newspapers according to which the League would be in trouble with the premier after his request for safe openings, Salvini cites “Draghi’s pragmatism” as an example to follow.
The message to Letta – in what is now a duel that seems destined to last underground as well, as an embryo of a new bipolarism – seems clear: the League is not going to give the Pd the “exclusive” of the Draghi government.
