Because I am amazed by the astonishment on the inspiration of Letta pro Di Maio
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
On the progressive bank of the river – a bit murky – in which our public discourse flows, the online newspaper Linkiesta is highly regarded. Natural, therefore, that the main names of the newspaper often and willingly offer their suggestions to the organization which – no offense to Giuseppe Conte – constitutes the main reference point of Italian progressivism, the Democratic Party: sometimes with the force of logic, others with the authority of history, always with the apprehension, the emphasis and the polemic vis-a-vis that it reserves for the causes that are felt to be their own.
The day before yesterday, the prevailing tone of the daily friendly preaching to the companions of the Nazarene was worried amazement, which is a physiological rhetorical style in an educator, when it is kept within the limits of the probable.
First reason for astonishment, the mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri. Linkiest writes to: "it is difficult to remember another mayor with so little physical, media or political presence and this is obviously a choice of the Mayor, who is not only temperamentally mild, one who does not like the limelight, but is also a politician used to working in silence ". It is the behavioral profile of a bureaucrat, but if this is Gualtieri's style and character, it is difficult to believe that those who chose him as candidates and who voted for him are only realizing it now, eight months after his inauguration in the Capitol, and are agitated in fear that the mayor's low profile will undermine the bright prospects of his council. They become so agitated as to foreshadow the risks of conspiracies: "We would not like the action of the council and the mayor himself to be in any way hindered or conditioned by political circles, as if there were a parallel action of pieces of politics to the institutional one".
Second reason for astonishment, the words of the secretary pd Enrico Letta who, in the aftermath of the "divorce" of Luigi Di Maio from Giuseppe Conte, while throwing, let's say, water on the fire, would not have excluded with all the necessary indignation a perspective that de Linkiesta analyst judges it unfortunate. Letta says: “It is premature to talk about Di Maio in our party, but dialogue with everyone”. In this case, rather than astonishment one should speak of scandal given the vehemence of the comment: "Luigi Di Maio", so Linkiesta, "for those who do not remember, he was a candidate in the last political elections as head of a movement that has always set as the main objective to wipe out the "octopus" of the Democratic Party (to use the words of an unforgettable manifesto of theirs in 2016), Di Maio himself who in 2019 accused the Democrats of taking away from families "children with 'electric shock to sell them »”.
This mixture of amazement and scandal is not an episodic attitude but reflects the constant line not only of the online newspaper which is on the same side as the Democratic Party, but of a large part of the supporting advertising. And – as my ignorance of politics allows me – I in turn must confess that this amazement amazes me.
I try to explain myself, considering things as superficially as possible, according to the wise recommendation of Karl Kraus. Achille Occhetto was the last leader of what would become the Democratic Party, in the sense that he was the manager who espoused a politics by putting his own person on the line: from this point of view, between Enrico Berlinguer and Occhetto there is no difference, while there is a lot between Occhetto and those who succeeded him. After Occhetto, the leadership team of the former PCI understood that the time of politics in Italy was over, and it was transformed into a sort of foundation dedicated to the management of the conspicuous positions of power and inherited networks of influence, entrusting to a the careful policy of alliances was the maintenance of the availability of an adequate quantity of votes (a bit like the aristocratic families relied on an effective "bourgeois" marriage policy to preserve their prestige and find partners capable of supporting the costs).
A choice incompatible with the ambition to pursue political objectives that does not require – indeed does not tolerate – politically ambitious leaders but requires careerist bureaucrats, possibly high: of course, not all organizations can afford a Mario Draghi, some have to be satisfied with a Letta or a Gualtieri also because perhaps they are enough and advance. Occhetto was the last. Matteo Renzi tried to be a political leader but, after being hit by the bulldozers of the "professoni" and "journaloni" (we still remember that unpublished "I must be honest: Renzi does not convince me" with which an editorial of front page of Corriere della Sera eight years ago), he learned his lesson and became a true professional, a sort of manager of "system operations", of which in fact he has boasted again recently in an interview with Le Temps : the ostracism of Matteo Salvini in 2019 and the defenestration of Conte in 2021-21.
After all, Letta was voted unanimously and the only thing on which the old and new cacique of the Democratic Party – regardless of the grillini delusions about the octopus – are certainly unanimous is on the desire to maintain the central position in the Italian power system that a set of circumstances, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to Operation Clean Hands to say the most glaring things, has granted them. From this point of view it is clear, even to people who are unfamiliar with politics, that the split of the Five Stars "puts on the market" interesting quantities of votes on which we must hurry to put our hats on. Other than "politics – understood as a struggle to affirm a position, to represent someone and something" as the beautiful souls of the supporters of the Democratic Party would like.
That this is not only the situation in Italy, but also in different ways throughout Europe, has been understood for a long time by the man in the street, who for the most part no longer even bothered to vote. Nor can we see why it should, in countries with limited double sovereignty, dependent not only on the lead country across the Atlantic but also on the hellish capital-techno-bureaucratic lobby in Brussels.
Honor to comrade Leonidas Brezhnev. On the other side of the Wall these inconvenient truths had already expressed them shamelessly on November 13, 1968: "When the forces that are hostile to socialism try to bring the development of some socialist countries towards capitalism, this does not become only a problem of country involved, but a common problem and a concern for all socialist countries ”. It is enough to replace "capitalism" with "authoritarianism", "socialism" with "democracy", and we see, once again, as plus ça change plus c'est la même cho se.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/letta-di-maio/ on Wed, 29 Jun 2022 13:39:12 +0000.