Like Teardo, Giovanni Toti also cultivated great political ambitions: in both of them the determination to one day rise to the role of leader of their respective parties. Toti, journalist and director of Mediaset, was pampered for a long time by Silvio Berlusconi (who forced him to lose weight to present him better to the cameras and voters) to the point of making him think that one day he could succeed him. A dream that the Genoese corruption investigation that led to his arrest severely shattered.
“But many investigations have ended with a result different from the one with which they sensationally began” says Defense Minister Crosetto, putting his hands forward with respect to another, possible judicial initiative destined to end in nothing. Like Crosetto, almost all the exponents of the centre-right, from Tajani to Salvini (“I also risk prison for having prevented the landings, a judge is not enough to say that a person is not good”) who reiterate their guaranteeist creed and they invite us to wait for the final sentences before making a judgment on the behavior of the powerful governor of Liguria, of his head of cabinet (accused of having facilitated the interests of mafia families when he was mayor of Porto Venere), of the CEO of the Iren group ( former president of the Genoese port authority), the entrepreneur Spinelli and several others.
An entirely predictable and even logical defense, but from a political point of view it leaves a glimmer of opportunity for important innovations. Brothers of Italy, which is also the majority party in the Region, was accepting Toti’s desire to run for a third term as governor in the elections scheduled for the end of 2025 without too much enthusiasm.
Now the Brothers are making it clear that, after the judicial earthquake, nothing is excluded, and that we could even vote prematurely by dissolving the Council. Legal hypotheses on the fate of the current administrative structure of Liguria are already overlapping but the feeling is that part of the centre-right is starting to prepare for a new season, for a post-Toti era now considered inevitable.
Among other things, local news says that FdI already has a good candidate for governor, the deputy mayor of Genoa. The scenario could be realized when the united opposition asks with an Assembly document for the resignation of the entire council: a joint vote between the left and part of the centre-right which would reset the situation could not be ruled out. “But it’s still too early to say anything” is how the Ligurian exponents of Giorgia Meloni’s party entrench themselves. Those who are boiling are the oppositions who point the finger at the “Toti system” of power management and ask to change the page.
However, there is a suspicion within the majority that this is an episode of clockwork justice just over a month before the European elections in June: Minister Lollobrigida says this explicitly, but the Keeper of the Seals Nordio also makes it clear by recalling his forty years of experience as a prosecutor to indirectly criticize the behavior of the Genoese judiciary. Which, through the Prosecutor, replies that the arrests had even been requested at the end of last year when the elections were still far away. A political script that never stops being recited on the national scene.
