Who is afraid of the election of Marta Cartabia to the presidency of the Republic?
Facts and scenarios on Cartabia according to Damato
How nice, at least for one of my age and my opinions or political preferences, the return to the so-called first Republic that I glimpsed in the previously veiled and now open campaign, explicit of the Fatto Quotidiano against the possibility that the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia is elected President of the Republic upon the expiry of Sergio Mattarella's mandate. The age she has, with 56 years of age in May, is more than the minimum required by the Constitution, the authority even after having been president of the Constitutional Court. And it also has the advantage of being the first woman to rise to the top of the state, having other stops at the presidencies of the Chambers: first Nilde Jotti and Laura Boldrini in Montecitorio and three years ago Maria Elisabetta Casellati in the Senate.
Even in the so-called First Republic, the competitions at the Quirinale began well before the convening of the Chambers and regional delegates to elect the new head of state. Sometimes they began even before the current six months and a little more, between probable or improbable hypotheses, explicit candidacies proposed by the most willing or malicious and implicit or silent self-candidatures, or only trials of intentions if marked by concerns, and not by auspices.
Even in 1992, when a long, grueling race to the highest hill in Rome was unblocked by a massacre – that of the mafia in Capaci, which cost the life of Giovanni Falcone, his wife and escort, with only one survivor – and ended in a very quick confrontation behind the scenes between the presidents of the chambers, for a so-called institutional solution, I personally picked up the candidacy of the loser in the next race, after seven years.
The republican Giovanni Spadolini, to whom the PDS-ex PCI had preferred the Christian Democrat Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, to whom certainly the DC led by Arnaldo Forlani could not say no, then accepting that Giorgio Napolitano would take over the presidency of the Chamber, responded more or less to the regret that I expressed to him by telephone: “Dear Francesco, I was so sure I could do it that I had prepared the inauguration speech, being the alternate president for the resignation of Cossiga. But I console myself by thinking that in seven years I will be the same age as the newly elected Scalfaro ”. Great, unforgettable, optimistic and legitimately ambitious Spadolini, who could not imagine the tumor probably already lurking, destined to take it away from us after two years and another disappointment: the lack of confirmation for a vote for the presidency of the Senate in 1994. It was the year of birth of the so-called second Republic with the electoral victory of Silvio Berlusconi and the arrival of Carlo Scognamiglio at the top of Palazzo Madama. Berlusconi himself, uneasy for political reasons that prevailed over personal feelings, tried to make amends by assigning the presidency of his Mondadori to Spadolini.
There was no leader of the first Republic, especially among the failed presidents such as Amintore Fanfani and Aldo Moro, in strictly alphabetical order and age, who did not allow himself to be tempted, despite a formally ostentatious disinterest, by the idea of training with large advance to the various editions of the race to the Quirinale. The presidency of the Senate that Fanfani wanted and obtained after the political elections of 1968 was immediately and generally interpreted as a reservation of the presidency of the Republic, in view of the near expiry of the mandate of Giuseppe Saragat, at the end of 1971.
The "strategy of attention" proposed towards the PCI in the autumn of that same 1968 by Moro, just dethroned by Palazzo Chigi, was equally generally, and perhaps not wrongly, interpreted as a counter-reservation of the Quirinale.
Then Fanfani would have really raced on behalf of his party without being able to be elected due to the obstinacy of the DC's "snipers" against him. And Moro would not even have succeeded in succeeding him as a candidate in the Chamber of Deputies because the Christian Democrat "big voters" by secret ballot, and by less than ten votes, would have preferred Giovanni Leone. Che Moro ordered his friends, one by one by calling them on the phone, to vote in a disciplined manner, allowing them to be elected on Christmas Eve.
Marta Cartabia, to get to the present day, and I don't even remember which edition of this Republic of ours, did not propose herself to anything or anyone. It was only proposed as the keeper of the seal, strongly supported by the Prime Minister Mario Draghi, to reform the short prescription of his five star predecessor Alfonso Bonafede. Which, running out at the first instance of trial, would leave the defendants for life. The minister has instead prepared, with an amendment to the reform of the criminal trial under examination by the Chamber, the inadmissibility after two or three years of useless waiting for the appeal sentence and twelve or eighteen months of useless waiting for the sentence of the Supreme Court, according to gravity of the crimes challenged by the prosecution. This reform, which would finally achieve the generically "reasonable duration" of the processes enshrined in Article 111 of the Constitution, was enough and advanced to the very hostile Fatto Quotidiano to attribute to the minister the will or possibility of being elected to the Quirinale with the votes of the center-right, evidently as an alternative to the already and even more hated Silvio Berlusconi himself. Who frankly would have some more difficulty, let's say, to make it than the minister. And perhaps he is the first to know, despite some opponents who consider him so naïve as to have really given us a thought.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-ha-paura-dellelezione-di-marta-cartabia-alla-presidenza-della-repubblica/ on Sun, 25 Jul 2021 05:40:36 +0000.