GENOA. If the pivot of Ligurian politics fails, the entire axis wobbles. Nine years after Toti’s triumphant entry into the office of governor, on the fourth floor of the regional headquarters in Piazza De Ferrari, one can draw a balance sheet of a political and administrative parable which – beyond the evolution of the judicial events, still to be defined – seems to have entered the sunset avenue.
From Mediaset news to the European Parliament
Heir of Emilio Fede in the diffusion of the Berlusconian verb, raised at the Mediaset school with Confalonieri and Pier Silvio, Toti entered the political arena ten years agowhen the Knight he is nominating him for Brussels in the 2014 European elections. The then director of Studio Aperto and Tg4 he has been cultivating a passion for politics for some time, which began as a boy in the ranks of the youth movement of the Socialist Party. His journalistic climb led him to become Berlusconi’s advisor, until the big step: he won in the European elections, taking home just under 150 thousand preferences: he was the most voted in Forza Italia in the North West.
Giovanni Toti, during the presentation of the new Rete4 news program in 2012 (handle)
Not even time to take the measures of the European Parliament before another turning point arrives. We vote for the regional elections, even in Liguria, a historically difficult land for the centre-right, and in the risk of candidacies between allies that box ends up in Forza Italia. Nobody really believes in victory, starting with Berlusconi: the only one who has hopes is Salvini. In a nocturnal meeting in Arcore, Toti goes from being Silvio’s advisor and MEP to candidate for the presidency of Liguria – thanks to the generous step backwards of Northern League member Edoardo Rixi. «You spend two months of electoral campaign and then you go back to Brussels» the Cavalier allegedly confided to him. Those two months will become nine years.
At that time the Ligurian left was torn apart in the fight for the succession to Burlando. On May 31, 2015 the vote takes place, and Toti surprisingly wins due to the divisions of his opponents: divisions and ignorance of the competitors will be a constant in the rise of Totism in Liguria. Right from the start, from the electoral campaign in which there is no shortage of slip-ups (the improvident “annexation” of Novi Ligure is the most shining example) one can sense one of its strong points: the ability to communicate, applying the strategies of marketing learned from a genius in the field like Berlusconi.
From an administrative point of view, Toti begins to systematically apply that mixture of turbo-liberalism and tertiarization of the economy that will become his trademark: in the field of healthcare he looks to the Lombard model with openness to private individuals, unlimited growth becomes a mantra, the reform of professional training is a feather in our cap. Faced with the crisis in the industry, it focuses heavily on tourism, a sector in which it gives vent to massive promotion that is often far from the sobriety and understatement typical of the Ligurians: from the red carpet of Portofino to the most recent inflatable mega-mortar that ended up on the Thames. For supporters it is the “politics of doing” that relegates “those who say no” to insignificance; for opponents it is a “predatory model” – copyright of Andrea Orlando – which undermines rights and fuels inequalities.
Meanwhile, his early slogan – “the wind has changed” – becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A cycle opens: after the 2015 regional elections, the centre-right wins in Savona in 2016, then in Genoa and La Spezia in 2017. It is the “Liguria model”: the Forza Italia-Lega-Fratelli d’Italia trident flanked by civic lists and moderate candidates drawn outside the political mainstream. It is in this phase that Toti, despite still being in Forza Italia, has the political intuition to occupy a space in the center under the Linus blanket of civility.
The apogee, however, arrives in the two-year period 2018-2020: the tragedy of the Morandi bridge – and the attempt, stopped by the Grillini in government, to have the role of commissioner for reconstruction – allows Toti to show the ability to obtain centrality in the emergency management. A pattern that will be repeated during the pandemic, when he will also take on the role of health councilor, only to then give up the delegation when the emergency is over and only the uncomfortable effects on waiting lists and quality of care will remain in the field . In between, he tries to move up the political ladder. After taking on the role of Forzi’s talking cricket, criticizing the involution of the Azzurri, Toti moves from the comfortable dolphin investiture to the Knight’s Freudian desire for political parricide in the summer of 2019.
For forty days he becomes, in tandem with Mara Carfagna, national coordinator of Forza Italia. When he realizes that the room for maneuver is non-existent, he slams the door and leaves the party to found Cambiamo: in that summer Salvini, after his triumph at the European Championships, deludes himself into thinking he is going to cash in and brings down the yellow-green government with the grillini . Toti offers himself on the national stage as a centrist crutch for the Captain by climbing onto the Northern League of a hypothetical Salvini government. However, he gets the timing wrong, and it won’t be the only time.
“Cambiamo” will be only the first of an endless string of small parties that pursue the same rationale: to create a centrist, moderate and civic “leg” of the center-right, which aspires to the political legacy of Berlusconism: followed by Coraggio Italia, Italia al Centro, We Moderates. But in Liguria, with a mimetic device imagined so as not to annoy the allies too much, his movement continues to define itself as the Toti List. In negotiations and in complicated situations, the governor knows how to be concave, without however giving up a polemical attitude fueled by a meticulous but fluent way of speaking. He knows how to appear soft, even if those who know him describe him as so pragmatic that he slips into cynicism.
At the 2020 regional elections, he wins by a landslide against Ferruccio Sansa. For an only apparent paradox, it is in the period of maximum strength that the Liguria model built over the years begins to show cracks: the triumph of his list – which obtained 22.6% of the votes in the regional elections – in Toti’s narrative is translated into hegemony within the coalition, transforming a civic formation into the “first political force” in the region. The weight of civility, confirmed by the successes of the non-party mayors nominated by the centre-right, causes a self-exaltation that slides into political hubris. The allies of the parties, faced with Toto’s excessive power, are starting to be more wary: when voting the centre-right marches united, but the cracks are there. The suspicion is that Toti cultivates a “destructuring civicism” – as a Fratelli d’Italia leader like Carlo Fidanza recently defined it – which aims to empty the parties. Toti increasingly combines the management of local power with political ambition, with a gradual rapprochement with Renzi and Calenda.
The contradictions explode far from Liguria: in Rome, in February 2022, during the voting to elect the President of the Republic. Toti participates as one of the “great voters” chosen by the Region, but does not take off the coat of the party leader. And while the centre-right is racking its brains in the negotiations, Toti plays along with Renzi and makes his votes go away over Elisabetta Casellati. If there were already plenty of enemies in Forza Italia before, the Brothers of Italy and the League will have this move on their fingers. The political elections are approaching, and Toti’s break with the centre-right seems one step away: the idea of joining the Third Pole with Renzi and Calenda goes to the archives when the latter signs the agreement (later abandoned) with the Democratic Party of Read.
Toti returns to Canossa, and obtains three colleges from his allies, two of which are in Liguria. Beyond the national flop (0.9%) of the Noi Moderati cartel, in which it took part with Lupi, Brugnaro and the UDC, the downsizing on a Ligurian scale weighs heavily: the 2.1% of the consensus demonstrates that the attempt to superimpose purely administrative consensus with the national dimension is an illusion, and confines Toti to the local dimension. This is where the latest idea was born: the castle in Liguria, with the not so veiled exit strategy of the third term. Yet another bet from a political gambler. It could be the last.
