The press conference of the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, seen by Maria Cristina Antonucci, Professor of Communication and Politics at the La Sapienza University of Rome
Last night’s press conference of the self-proclaimed “grandfather at the service of the institutions” seems to the image, severe but reassuring, evoked during the previous meeting with the mass media, for Christmas greetings, in which the self-candidacy to the Quirinale was revealed.
The choice of the issues to be addressed seemed to respond to a precise plan of reassurance of public opinion: attention to the great difficulties of young people, concern for the spread of the epidemic, urgency not to stop economic activities.
All “severe but fair” themes, capable of providing adequate reassurance to that reflective middle class which, for too long now, is used to taking doses of precaution and caution towards reality on the part of the media mainstream.
In terms of lexicon, this thematic selection seems to appeal to two key words, used quite frequently in the Draghian lexicon but unusual in his political language: trust and growth.
Two reassuring terms, which smell of a shareable future for all those citizens who, plagued by two years of pandemic, only want to rely on the idea of a near-term improvement. Two key words aimed at accrediting the idea that the Prime Minister is a figure capable of mobilizing, with this longing for hope (tiny), popular support for the only goal that he reserves in his heart but which he fails to achieve. publicly pronounce: the highest hill. Far from wanting to make psychoanalytical conspiracies on the reason for this tactic, it should be noted that it emerges in a measure directly proportional to the difficulties of management of the governmental structure. The more the coalition makes government action difficult, also because of the well-known quirinal events,
In formal terms, finally, the plot twist of the entire press conference, sworn by very rigid rules regarding the admission of journalists and the inadmissibility of questions on the Quirinale, takes place at the end: with the most sardonic of smiles, Draghi notes that it is not intervened at the end of the Council of Ministers to communicate the new rules set in the Decree Law because he had “underestimated expectations” and apologized, asking the journalists to consider the current press conference as “a remedial act”. A curtain that seems devised by a communication staff, which certainly has its difficulties in trying to empathize the former central banker.
If, on the other hand, we go on to analyze the political meaning of Draghi’s speech, the marketing operation with the large party and parliamentary voters shows all the difficulties of the case, especially in comparison with the questions of the mass media professionals admitted to the press conference. Focus on the vaccine as the only key to get out of the pandemic, express blame of the minority of non-vaccinated people in relation to the continuation of the pandemic, openness as the need not to see the economic activities closed (despite the drop in turnover and the growing costs related to energy and inflation ) are presented as incomplete responses in terms of internal politics and isolated in terms of comparison with the different responses made by other governments to the same problems. A political strategy linked to a double track:
A strategy that might have seemed enlightened six months ago, but which today manifests more than one question, especially when compared with the reality of other European systems, in which there is no centrality of the different green pass formats to regulate economic life. , legal and social issues of citizens, and in which, with a mix of non-compulsory vaccination and therapies, attempts are made to overcome the health crisis in different ways.
A different approach on which the Prime Minister is also solicited by an English journalist, who proposes a comparison on the strategies of UK and Italy for the exit from the pandemic, and who sees the question sent back to the sender without providing a plausible answer. And perhaps this is the main difficulty that Draghi’s experience for the Presidency of the Council and the silent candidacy for the Quirinale have to face: a limited practice in the field of the rules of democratic politics in parliamentary systems – understood as comparison and synthesis – which is opposed the myth of centralist decision-making, which should bring immediate answers to crisis solutions.
If decisionism does not work in fact (the pandemic numbers declare it openly, despite the evocation of the objective enemy), the difficulty in managing the confrontation with the coalition parties becomes the debilitating element of the Prime Minister’s strategy to continue to govern or become President of the Republic. Because, as Pietro Scoppola wrote in a book too soon forgotten, for better or for worse, Italy and the Republic of parties, not the political system of the decision-maker alone in command.
