5 Star Spin
What is said among the Five Stars after Luigi Di Maio's letter to the sheet
The apologies of the Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio to the former Piddino mayor of Lodi, Simone Uggetti, for the five years spent in the pillory, and a bit also in jail, for the alleged swimming pool scandal were as noisy as they were convicting. Which was ridden in the square, imitated by the Northern League player Roberto Calderoli, by Di Maio himself, then head of the local authorities of the 5 Star Movement. “Is it a real turning point?”, Massimiliano Panarari prudently asked himself in the Press .
Even Uggetti, after all, just acquitted on appeal in Milan from the accusation of auction disruption, which had caused him to be arrested and resigned as mayor in 2016, and in 2018 the sentence in first instance to 10 months, albeit with acknowledgment of having acted in the "public interest", he cultivates some doubts about Di Maio's apologies if he has accepted them with reserve. "I hope that the repentance is sincere," he said, commenting on the letter sent to the Gazette , and published with a red headline on the front page, by the Foreign Minister. Thanks also to the toughness practiced as head of local authorities, he then earned promotion to political leader of the Grillino movement trying to climb even Palazzo Chigi. Where he had to resign himself after the 2018 general elections to having an office only as vice president of the Council.
Now Di Maio is no longer head of the 5 Star Movement, or what remains of it, nor vice president of the Council and multiple minister, as in the first government of Giuseppe Conte , but "only", so to speak, owner of the Farnesina. Where he actually divides his time between two jobs. Of course, one is the institutional one of Foreign Minister, the other is the less visible, more discreet but perhaps politically more concrete one to stay on the ball, let's say, in the movement entrusted even at the word by Beppe Grillo to the former Prime Minister Conte.
Distracted, let's say, by the internal disputes of the movement, which are also putting his professional skills as a lawyer and university professor of law to the test, Conte has been preceded – or "displaced", as the Republic has titled – by Di Maio in an important or significant passage such as that of the apology to the former mayor of Lodi, preparatory to a turning point. He managed to speak only of a remittance, secondarily, to repeat with Di Maio that "feeding the media pillory to counter opponents for electoral purposes contributes to the barbarization of the political conflict": a past practice to which the 5 Star Movement , or how the hell can or should be called after the refoundation in progress in the private home of Conte and surroundings, should give up. But who knows if this turning point will facilitate or damage Conte's takeover. To which II Fatto with the usual timeliness and ease, recalled that Uggetti is "confessed guilty", although acquitted because "the fact" – the judicial one – "does not exist".
However, under the stars there is also a dissident like Stefano Buffagni who proposed to offer Uggetti that joint candidacy of Pd and Grillini as deputy, unsuccessfully attempted with Conte, in the autumn by-elections in Siena to replace the resigning deputy from Piddino. and former Treasury Minister Pier Carlo Padoan, who preferred Unicredit to the Chamber. The "locals" of the Democratic Party this time could be there to compensate for a party comrade who five years ago deserved to be proudly supported, as it did not happen.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/giravolte-a-5-stelle/ on Sat, 29 May 2021 06:00:35 +0000.