GENOA – «John, you won». “But don’t talk nonsense.” He came down from the second floor of the Bristol hotel still in disbelief and convinced that some former colleague was playing a prank call on him. “Are you really sure?” he asked while his parents were dragging him in triumph towards Piazza De Ferrari, the place where Genoese politics celebrates itself. “You won, and now it’s your business, because you’ll have to work seriously.”
The arrest
Who knows if he thought about it on that evening at the end of May 2015, when everything had begun in the most unexpected way, thanks to the collective suicide of a divided center-left. “President by chance” headlined the dear old man Mercantile Courier, still on newsstands at the time. The beginning of this story could not be more different from the end, as told by his lawyer. Giovanni Toti was forced to stop in Sanremo, while he was heading towards the inauguration of his friend Flavio Briatore’s new Twiga, at the Benjamin Bay in Ventimiglia. “Please lawyer,” he would have said. “Let me out of this nightmare.”
Beginnings in politics
Perhaps, only the facial expression remained the same, yesterday as then. The amazement of a person who cannot understand what is happening to him. Yet, among many former journalists who have passed on the other side of the fence, Toti has always been the one with the most substance to face the change of role. He had prepared himself. First how Silvio Berlusconi’s dolphin, then as an MEP, elected in 2014, and finally, due to his attachment to the Forza Italia shirt, a candidate to lose in the difficult Liguria. “You do two months of electoral campaign and then you go straight back to Strasbourg,” the Cavaliere told him.
In Liguria
“Imagine if they had to put me in someone who doesn’t know how to talk to people.” At the Republic Day the following year, he was already another Toti. With a stern look, he pushed a shy one Marco Bucci, aspiring mayor of Genoa indicated by the entire center-right, to introduce himself to the people waving the tricolor, again in Piazza De Ferrari. He already felt like the dominus. In the following two years, he would in effect plant every possible flag on the map of Liguriamaking his candidates win in La Spezia, Savona and dozens of other municipalities.
The personal party
The perpetual intolerance towards allied parties, the tendency to act as a soloist, building his own transversal structure of people united by loyalty and the continuous promotion of his figure, was already smoldering under his skin. In the variable geometry of his moods, the only figure who, even in frequent conflicts, he always kept close to him, thanks to a never-disowned friendship, was that of his opposite, Matteo Salvini. The leader of the League is as extreme in his opinions as Toti is a Christian Democrat in his soul. It is no coincidence that in August 2019, there were the days of Papeete and the fall of the first Conte government, he leaves Forza Italia to start his own business, founding a party which the intention was to ferry him towards a powerful ministry in a new executive led by his different twin.
That will be the first of many miscalculations at the national level. In 2020 Toti will run again in Liguria, above all because the alternative does not exist. On the day of the re-election, under a gazebo that protected from the heavy rain, he rejoiced reading the results of his personal list, a record 23 percent which however cannibalized his allies. «You are the De Luca of Liguria» a visiting parliamentary friend told him. “But without the fried fish,” was the reply. Few paid attention to the comment of one of his close collaborators, who let slip a joke that is now almost prophetic. “We beat everyone,” he said, laughing. «But we also took on board everything».
Toti immediately attempted to propose himself again as national leader, making the Ligurian experiment available to the centre-right, which was increasingly impatient with him and his manifest ambitions. His dream of representing the moderate leg of the coalition soon faded. The Liguria laboratory was all he had left. But the formula remained that of the 2020 Regionals. A list with his name in every city, everywhere, to reiterate a centrality that he felt was increasingly at risk. A system to be fed at one’s own expense. Which, in essence, is what the judge accuses him of. «Pressed by the need to raise funds to face the electoral campaign, he made his function, his powers and his role available in exchange for funding».
If this is really what it is about, it is above all a sin of arrogance, perhaps even useless. Because especially today, it is good to remember that there was also the Giovanni Toti of autumn 2018, capable of fighting to rebuild the Morandi bridge quickly and well, and to show remarkable skills in managing that serious emergency. It was the Five Star Movement that denied him the role of special commissioner for reconstruction which he cared so much about, thus opening Pandora’s box of his desire for affirmation and revenge at a national level. He did it for himself, of course. But not only. In the early afternoon of that terrible eve of August 15th when everything came down, we found him slumped on a chair in the lobby of the Civil Protection. “There will be at least forty dead,” he said. “Forty families destroyed while going to work or on holiday.” And meanwhile, Giovanni Toti was crying.
