“The tiring, very tiring solution of the quirinal crisis leads to relief and anxiety at the same time. The relief is for having come to terms with it, albeit at the end of a tortuous, destructive and not always easy to understand path. Anxiety is linked to the awareness that the system crisis that politics has been going through for quite a few years has now cracked down again, and by dint of screwing up it seems to herald even more bleak prospects.
The re-election of Mattarella (completely involuntary, at least on the part of the interested party) is a balm on the wounds of politics. But the wounds remain. The Draghi government is weaker, weakened by the conflicts and misunderstandings that have arisen within its perimeter. And the parties, all the parties, have shown an extreme difficulty in governing themselves. Neither strong enough to discipline themselves, nor reasonable enough to seek a broader understanding, nor farsighted enough to understand the outcome and consequences of their own moves. A full blown debacle.
It will be said that this crisis comes from afar, and it was almost predictable. Moreover, which was perhaps justified by the difficulty of bringing together political forces at the antipodes of each other under the roof of the same majority. The point, however, is that each of them trusted in the appointment of the vote for the head of state to finally find an opportunity for redemption. Thus, for months and months they all went on to say that the Quirinale was the political navel of the world, that it was the mother of all battles, that each of the protagonists had a thousand cards to play, that there, on that playing field, the fate of the country would have been decided almost definitively. And so on, from one proclamation to the next, proceeding amidst granite certainties which then inexorably ended up canceling each other out.
The first half of this dispute revolved around the government and its premier. Producing the surreal rift between those who wanted to promote Draghi al Colle to shore up his political course. And how many, unwilling to do so, suddenly pretended that they could not do without his talent for governing. A rift that has ended up making both things incomprehensible and weakening both the prime minister and his, let’s call them, coalition shareholders.
The second half of the dispute then became the dividing line between those who claimed the primacy of politics (and therefore, in this case, of Parliament), and those who seemed almost resigned to giving up the stick of command, at least for some time, to commissioner figures who allowed professionals in the field to catch their breath, clarify their ideas and study new game schemes.
Now, it can be seen that none of these disputes have been successful. Since the government is still the same, only weaker. And the derby between politics and the rest of the world ended with an unproductive zero to zero. Which apparently leaves things where they were before. But in the meantime it wears out and consumes everyone a bit.
The fact is that in recent days the crisis of representative democracy has become even more acute. And people’s distrust even deeper. Previously, a large majority of Italians cheered for presidentialism. And now, in the aftermath of so many failed ballots, so many ballots thrown to the wind, so many proclamations sadly left in abeyance, it must be assumed that that cheering has increased even more in intensity and perhaps in volume.
Personally, I am wary of this drift. I am old enough to still believe in the moderating virtue of representation. For me, democracy is essentially a mediation, and even more so in a country where too many times the partisan passion has crossed its mark. But this time the spot for presidentialism was made by the most representative leaders. Finally asking Mattarella to remedy their mistakes. We hope that it will be enough “.
(by Marco Follini)
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