I’ll tell you about Giuseppe Conte’s 5-star penalties
Past, present and (perhaps) future of Giuseppe Conte
On one point, I believe that Giuseppe Conte has the sacrosanct right to solidarity even from those who disagree with his increasingly critical positions towards Mario Draghi's government, even in the context of a "loyal support" which he has assured him, even if he is not parliamentary and therefore not being able to grant him or deny him trust, nor being able to indicate the line to a parliamentary group, from the outside, as head of the corresponding movement or party. To that of the 5 Stars, however, to which he also owes his stay at Palazzo Chigi for about two and a half years, that is, for half of the legislature that came out of the polls of 2018, Conte is not even registered.
The solidarity that Conte deserves, or is due to him, is precisely because of this anomalous, indefinite, uncertain position to which, agreed, he may have been wrong in having lent himself, but which does not take into account the point at which things have now arrived. also from its responsibilities. They are now all and only of Grillo and, more generally, of the Movement, starting with those who institutionally represent him at the top of the parliamentary groups, official interlocutors, let's say, of the government and, in case of crisis, of the head of the State. Who once, at the beginning of the republican history of Italy, in the ritual consultations for the formation of a new government called only the presidents of the parliamentary groups, not the secretaries of their respective parties. It was the reason why the good soul of Palmiro Togliatti, very jealous of his political prerogatives, used to accumulate the posts of secretary, in fact, of the PCI and of group leader in Montecitorio, where he preferred to be elected rather than to the Senate.
I imagine the temptation of Draghi – siding so clearly with the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia on the changes to be made to the reform of the criminal trial under consideration by the Chamber – to hear from the voice of his predecessor at Palazzo Chigi the reasons for the dissent he publicly announced from the amendments unanimously decided by the Council of Ministers in a session preceded or accompanied by a telephone consultation of Draghi himself with Grillo. Which can be said to be substantially confirmed by the silence opposite to the spread of the news. But I also imagine the scruple felt by Draghi himself in giving Conte, in a direct conversation, the credentials he does not yet have. And who knows if and when he will have, given the unpredictability of the movement of reference for now only journalistic, at best, of the former Prime Minister. And I say "in the best of cases" because in the same newspapers in which we read of the peace intervened between Grillo and Conte, sanctioned yesterday by a convivial meeting, on the road to the refoundation of the Movement, after the recent and furious clash in which the former had practically given the incapacity to the other, there are the evaluations, forecasts and so on of the pentastellated parliamentarians who could participate in a split promoted by the non-registered professor and lawyer.
I really do not believe I am not revealing a mystery, nor violating the trust of those who told me about it at the time in great detail, if I remember the moments – so to speak – of surprise and even panic experienced at the Quirinale three years ago after the Conte renounced the task of forming the government due to the refusal of the head of state to fully accept the list of ministers proposed to him, in which professor Paolo Savona was assigned the Ministry of Economy.
Conte appeared at the Quirinale, according to some journalistic reports, already returned or about to return to Florence to resume university teaching, and the President of the Republic, not at all intimidated by the threats of so-called impeachment raised by the shift head of the Grillino Movement, had already announced and conferred the new position of Prime Minister to the economist Carlo Cottarelli, who climbed the Hill with his wheeled suitcase, when news came of the resumption of negotiations between pentastellati and leagues to redefine an agreement on the program, or contract, of a new government, as well as on the names of ministers.
It took – they told me – all the patience of the Secretary General of the Quirinale to prevent the change from leading to a sensational institutional accident. It took all the patience of Sergio Mattarella to authorize his main collaborator to allow the resumed negotiations to continue without any new assignment. And all the patience and irony of Cottarelli to laugh at it and prepare for the renunciation of the mandate if Grillini and the Northern League were able – as they later succeeded – to agree and propose to the President of the Republic a shared list of ministers, with Savona moved from the Ministry of the Economy to the almost neighboring Ministry of European Affairs: the same ones that had seemed threatened or compromised by Savona himself at the superdicastery in via XX Settembre.
There was no shortage of anomalies, at least with respect to the habits of political and parliamentary reporters, not even on the occasion of the passage from the first to the second government of Conte and the resignation of the latter, delayed a few weeks after the release of the Renzian component to allow the president of the Council still in office to attempt the recruitment of new units in the majority, without the usual passage of a crisis. But the major anomaly of this curious eighteenth republican legislature was yet to come. And it is that of a kind of political guest who has become a Count without credentials, at least for how we poor, inexperienced political chroniclers were used to considering them.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/giuseppe-conte-m5s-futuro/ on Sat, 17 Jul 2021 06:13:20 +0000.