He remembers everything, quotes off the cuff, doesn’t forget a date, a page number, an anecdote, a newspaper article (even if it came out ten or twenty years earlier): it is a Gianni Letta with a formidable pyrotechnic memory, the one who captures the attention of those present at the presentation of the book-interview “The structures of power” (Laterza edition), a volume in which Sabino Cassese, jurist and judge emeritus of the Consulta, is interviewed by Alessandra Sardoni, journalist and presenter of La7. And it is a Letta who launches a conversation around the structures of power, the subject of the book and the debate, but above all around a power, that of the prime minister, on which it is no coincidence that the words of the speakers end up resting (including those of Cassese – who at the end pronounces the word “premiered”, what is not there but could have been or could be). Deciding, that’s the problem, says the professor Ernesto Galli of the Loggia, drawing in the air the contours of the swamp into which the country fell, and evoking the times in the history of the first post-war period in which a decision was made and therefore it was done, unlike the last decades, in which often it was not decided and it wasn’t done. Among the speakers, alongside Sardoni and Cassese, is the director of Tg La7 Enrico Mentana and the vice president of the Chamber Giorgio Mulè they listen in silence to Letta telling anecdotes and recalling circumstances, incredibly devoid of notes except for the reading of a passage taken from Leonardo Sciascia with a quote from Machiavelli, a reading in which the exact words must become very exact, because for the rest Letta, in the dual role of witness to recent Italian history (as undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council in the four Berlusconi governments and as director of Tempo), he does not need any paper aid when, speaking of the Accountant General of the State as a subordinate power based in the Ministry of Economy , makes it clear that someone, at the time of Cav., was in some way a screen for the Prime Minister-Accountant General exchange (“dualism” between Palazzo Chigi and Via XX Settembre, says Letta, and in the audience more than one respondent thinks of Giulio Tremonti, without Letta saying his name).
He remembers everything, quotes off the cuff, doesn’t forget a date, a page number, an anecdote, a newspaper article (even if it came out ten or twenty years earlier): it is a Gianni Letta with a formidable pyrotechnic memory, the one who captures the attention of those present at the presentation of the book-interview “The structures of power” (Laterza edition), a volume in which Sabino Cassese, jurist and judge emeritus of the Consulta, is interviewed by Alessandra Sardoni, journalist and presenter of La7. And it is a Letta who launches a conversation around the structures of power, the subject of the book and the debate, but above all around a power, that of the prime minister, on which it is no coincidence that the words of the speakers end up resting (including those of Cassese – who at the end pronounces the word “premiered”, what is not there but could have been or could be). Deciding, that’s the problem, says the professor Ernesto Galli of the Loggia, drawing in the air the contours of the swamp into which the country fell, and evoking the times in the history of the first post-war period in which a decision was made and therefore it was done, unlike the last decades, in which often it was not decided and it wasn’t done. Among the speakers, alongside Sardoni and Cassese, is the director of Tg La7 Enrico Mentana and the vice president of the Chamber Giorgio Mulè they listen in silence to Letta telling anecdotes and recalling circumstances, incredibly devoid of notes except for the reading of a passage taken from Leonardo Sciascia with a quote from Machiavelli, a reading in which the exact words must become very exact, because for the rest Letta, in the dual role of witness to recent Italian history (as undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council in the four Berlusconi governments and as director of Tempo), he does not need any paper aid when, speaking of the Accountant General of the State as a subordinate power based in the Ministry of Economy , makes it clear that someone, at the time of Cav., was in some way a screen for the Prime Minister-Accountant General exchange (“dualism” between Palazzo Chigi and Via XX Settembre, says Letta, and in the audience more than one respondent thinks of Giulio Tremonti, without Letta saying his name).
And at a certain point the former undersecretary also tells, again off the cuff, about when Cassese, in the Sunday newspaper of the Sole 24 Ore, began an intervention by quoting an entire paragraph of an incomprehensible law, just to make it clear what subject matter he could the proverbial incomprehensibility of law must be made, something impossible to bear for someone who, like Cassese, says Letta, is “in love with law”. The immaterial stone guest of the speech – the prime minister, any prime minister as a decision-maker – reappears as a non-rhetorical figure when Cassese evokes the problem of modern democracies: who decides? Modern democracies, says the professor, “have rightly given voice” to collective interests, but then who and how establishes which of the collective interests should prevail? The “how to decide”, says Cassese, can only be expressed in two ways: negotiation or arbitration power, that is, a power of “last word between all the contenders”. An argument that leads towards something which, he says, “seems close to premiership”. But it is not simple, in a world in which parties are “reduced to electoral committees” and in which the web becomes a stage for everyone, and without mediation. On the other hand, Cassese, says Letta, never wanted to directly exercise power, even for his entire life, committing himself to “explain, exhort, warn, influence”.
