What will change in the center with Toti and Brugnaro’s Coraggio Italia?
Paola Sacchi's Note on centrist movements and upheavals
The regret of Silvio Berlusconi, attributed to Forza Italia sources, leaked yesterday in the news agencies is above all that 12 deputies are leaving just as FI is establishing itself as a ruling party. Decisive party, together with Matteo Salvini's League, in the national emergency executive led by Mario Draghi that Berlusconi was the first to want. Surveys still in a single figure, difficulty in re-grasping at least the vital threshold of 10 percent, "yet Forza Italia with its representatives is reaffirming a good ruling class of government", observed a long time ago one of its members of the first hour.
It is the paradox that one would say that it is more a force for government than for struggle. Who now risks not capitalizing, as he would have liked, starting with the administrative ones, in the country the results achieved for a gradual return to normality in the post-Covid era. With many of the blue proposals passed with this executive, together with those of the League, the proposals of what Salvini defined, with Antonio Tajani, "the center-right of the government".
The passage of the blue parliamentarians to "Coraggio Italia" by Giovanni Toti and Luigi Brugnaro, the entrepreneur-mayor of Venice, due to the number of interested parties and the role that some have covered as regional and local coordinators, is undoubtedly more striking than at other times .
So far there have been numerous attempts to form new small parties in the center, which then have not broken through. The refrain has also started from the blue ranks: whoever leaves Berlusconi is doomed to irrelevance. And the facts proved him right.
The difference, however, now lies in the fact that at the moment the Cav has not yet returned to the field. And in all this there is a certain emptiness that is felt in the liberal component, in the center, all the more so in the face of a Pd increasingly crushed by Enrico Letta on the left, probably in an attempt to take the votes lost by the grillini.
"The center-right has many problems, starting with the paradox that despite detaching the left even by 6 points, it does not find young candidates, forty-year-olds in the cities, but we can say that in the meantime there is Letta who works for them", he summarized on TV to " Tonight Italy ”, with a joke, a brilliant Daniele Capezzone, snatching a smile from the blue Andrea Mandelli, vice president of the Chamber, at the end of a not exactly exciting day for FI. Which yesterday preferred to keep a low profile, after the press conference of Toti and Brugnaro, who, in any case, wanted to reiterate that their movement will remain in the center-right.
But in the meantime the paradox is that that mythical center is already represented in the Draghi government by FI and, despite tired and lazy labeling by the mainstream, also by that pragmatism of a League for growth and development, attentive to the middle classes, entrepreneurial, which it would be wrong to continue to classify as sovereign tout court.
The parliamentary weakening of FI, despite the birth of a movement that defines itself as a center, risks throwing the coalition to the right and accentuating the race for leadership between Giorgia Meloni, president of Fratelli d'Italia, intent on capitalizing on her choice to stand in the opposition, and Salvini. All this while the left is most in trouble. With the leader of the Democratic Party, who despite meetings at Palazzo Chigi and denials of the type: with Draghi everything is fine, he appears instead to be in difficulty precisely in affirming his party as the most solid government shareholder.
In this case, however, neither a center of struggle nor of government is seen at the moment in the parts of the Nazarene. Another thing if attempts by Matteo Renzi and Carlo Calenda will start to create an area that will one day join Brugnaro himself. Even if yesterday both he and Toti were categorical about staying in the center-right.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/che-cosa-cambiera-al-centro-con-coraggio-italia-di-toti-e-brugnaro/ on Fri, 28 May 2021 05:39:27 +0000.