Francesco Damato
June 21, 2024
Ultimately, the one that Italian politics is waging against the dictionary in a chain of oxymorons is also part of the almost third world war on pills, as the Pope says. We have an openly conservative right, even in the moderate and non-“extreme” parts imagined in Berlin by the limping Chancellor Sholz, which happily innovates. The first of the four parliamentary steps of the reform of the Constitution which introduces the direct election of the Prime Minister has just taken place in the Senate. How mayors have been elected for years Municipalities and the presidents of the Regions without either one or the other having left democracy.
In the Chamber, the implementation of the so-called differentiated regional autonomies introduced in the Constitution in 2001 by the left, which was courting the League of Umberto Bossi on the terrain of federalism to try to prevent a return to the alliance with Silvio Berlusconi. From which the then President of the Republic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro managed to escape at the end of 1994, not at all resigned to calm after having tried in vain to drag the quasi-leader of the Church into the fight against the then Prime Minister. He has just confirmed this, in the deafening and embarrassing, as well as embarrassed, silence of what still remains – that is, a lot – of the left of the time, cloaked at the dawn of the Second Republic in the openly progressive guise.
The progressives, in fact, who were officially registered in 2020 grillino Giuseppe Conte even becoming the “most advanced point” for intertwined declarations and interviews by the secretary of the Democratic Party Nicola Zingaretti and his reference “philosopher” Goffredo Bettini; the progressives, I was saying, now want to go not forward but backwards compared to the constitutional reform of 2001. And, pouring buckets of political sewage on themselves, they paint the Republic of the regions that they themselves designed 23 years ago as destined for disintegration, sunk in disorder and so on infernando. From Hell, although Pope Francis optimistically imagines it has been evicted for some time. It is not the first time, to tell the truth, that Italian progressives have taken a step forward. Already in the first, now distant first Republic guillotined by the judiciary, overturning the relations with politics established by the constituents, the progressives like Berlinguer, much celebrated in recent days, mistook the Constitution for a fort besieged by Bettino Craxi with his institutional reform projects. And Craxi also entered the group of reactionaries, like before him an old champion of anti-fascism and anti-Francoism such as the republican Randolfo Pacciardi. That he had dared to collect and relaunch those traces of presidentialism that had already emerged in the discussions at the Constituent Assembly. Poor Pacciardi almost died of a broken heart, challenged first by the leader of his political area Ugo La Malfa.
Not even Malfa – rest her soul – was joking in the war against the dictionary. Indeed, common sense. I remember the dismay he caused me personally in 1973, receiving a half insult when I dared to challenge him in a corridor of the Chamber. Those were the months and days in which the government of “centrality” Andreotti-Malagodi, as the then secretary of the DC Arnaldo Forlani called it, having had it created after the exit of the socialists from the center-left due to the election of Giovanni Leone at the Quirinale, it was pushed towards the crisis by Amintore Fanfani in the DC and by La Malfa, precisely , outside the DC. It was La Malfa, formally preceding Fanfani who was dumping his former darling Forlani behind the scenes, who notified Andreotti of the eviction, breaking the majority on the dispute over the so-called postal code. Which was not the one you young people perhaps imagined when thinking about the numbers that precede the cities in correspondence, but the one then also being discussed to introduce color television. To which La Malfa, supported by the PCI, was against for reasons of austerity, fearing the waste that Italians would make by changing televisions. In the background there were formally disagreements over the French – Secam – or German – Pal – system to be adopted on a technical level. Devil of a progressive, La Malfa, with his favorite black and white not even Juventus. La Malfa and the communists who followed him in order to achieve a government crisis.
