“It’s the end of a nightmare,” says Roberto Salis as he enters the front door with his daughter at 7pm yesterday. There are daughters who give their parents trouble, and Ilaria Salis belonged to this category. But when his daughter definitively got into trouble by getting arrested in Hungary, dad Salis had no hesitation in doing his job as a father to the fullest, becoming the main activist of the movement for his liberation. Mission accomplished. And yesterday father Salis made the final effort: a journey of two thousand kilometres, almost without breaks, to pick up Ilaria in Budapest and bring her home to Monza. Freed by the Hungarian judges without even waiting for the official announcement of the election results, Salis will wait at home for the announcement of her election as MEP. From that moment on, in addition to her freedom, she will have earned immunity, with the forced freezing of the criminal proceedings against her for the February 2023 attacks in the Hungarian capital.
If Roberto Salis’ choice to avoid air travel was dictated by the desire not to make his daughter’s return home too spectacular, with crews stationed at Linate or Malpensa, it was only partially achieved. Salis returns as a private citizen, without institutional welcome or partisan celebrations, but finding the sidewalk crowded with journalists. She slides down the stairs, tired and smiling, without speaking: «She’s distraught and needs a shower», says dad Roberto, who, as in recent weeks, takes care to face the media: saying that «there was emotion, we’re there even take a photo in front of the Monza sign, because it was a great experience.” Tomorrow the woman turns forty: “We’ll do something for her birthday, we have to celebrate two because we missed last year’s.”
Starting today, Salis will have to deal with her new role as a public figure, caught between a movementist past and an institutional present. Hovering over her is the Hungarian criminal case, which does not end with the election to the Strasbourg Parliament. European immunity is much broader than that granted to Italian parliamentarians, because it protects not only from arrest but also from trials. To continue the proceedings against Salis, the Hungarian judiciary needs the green light from the Community Parliament, to which it has already announced its intention to request authorisation: unless the accused renounces it. A sentence said by Roberto Salis last night seems to leave this possibility open: “Now we must ensure – he says – that this accusation for which Ilaria believes she is innocent is cancelled”, and it is clear that the only way available to Salis to to be exonerated is to agree to be tried. «There will certainly be strategies», says the father last night, with a cryptic phrase. But these are choices that will be seen later, after the former antagonist has confronted the two Milanese lawyers, Mauro Straini and Eugenio Losco, who have assisted her from the beginning.
«Now I am resigning not only as spokesperson for my daughter – says Salis senior – but also as a candidate for third parties.
At this point I leave the scene completely and from now on all journalists can contact the Avs press office”, is Roberto Salis’s farewell to the media. Outside the house, the photographers remain but no Volante: here, unlike in Budapest, Ilaria has nothing to fear.
