The death of Giorgio Napolitano, a man of power full of contradictions
Was Giorgio Napolitano a political strategist or a party man astute in making himself concave or convex as needed? It’s difficult to share ideas, at least for me, but the mental architecture of a man who chews power as he breathes, shone through in every move, in just the way he looked at you, walked, waited, spoke with a stranger, in that cultured Italian but full of distinctions and secondaries that emerged even in a banal exchange of opinions. And it’s what happened to me in the spring of 2006.
They were hectic days for me as a councilor, I went in and out of the office of the mayor of Bologna at the time, Sergio Cofferati, to discuss the discovery I had made of the illegitimate assignments of public housing carried out for decades by the same municipality. On a particularly hectic morning I found myself crossing that threshold at least three times in an hour (an absolute record for the time, given the abysmal distance that Cofferati put between himself and his “collaborators”) and every time I always saw an elderly gentleman in dark blue loden, hat in hand waiting in the antechamber. At first I didn’t recognize him and I was sorry to see a person of a certain age standing there roasting himself back and forth waiting for a nod. Then looking at him better I recognized his profile: he was Giorgio Napolitano, eighty-one years old at the time.
He had been waiting perhaps an hour already, so I approached him and said hello. I didn’t dare ask him the reasons for the visit but we talked about this and that for about fifteen minutes. At that moment his name was not circulating in the newspapers and therefore he could take advantage of the media silence to build his relationships behind the scenes, in view of the election of the President of the Republic. In my head the reasons for the visit seemed obvious, given the looming deadline. And he had the right CV. Napolitano had stopped by Cofferati to ask for his support. After all, they had been part of the same current in the PCI, the Miglioristi, and the mayor of Bologna was still one of the 3 million CGIL demonstrators in the streets (or presumed to be so) against the Berlusconi government. At the time his media influence had the power to shift public opinion within the DS (now PD) and also among parts of the more radical left.
I tried somehow to do the honors and suggest he have a coffee at the bar but thanking me, with his eyes fixed on the mayor’s door, he didn’t accept the invitation. I was struck by his somewhat formal, Byzantine verbal register, which he used to return the courtesy of attention to me, asking me what the atmosphere was like in Bologna since the new council was there. A short and polite exchange in which I sensed his anxiety about a meeting that could also end in a negative way, even for a politician with a skilled apparatus like him. But while we were talking standing, he still with his big black hat in his hand, surely warned of my attack on the guest, Cofferati came out and put an end to my reckless presence and they went to his rooms. My unscheduled intrusion it was not foreseen in Cofferati’s attrition strategies but without knowing it it shortened the antechamber for the future president.
Someone from the secretariat later confided to me that I didn’t think badly about the reasons for the visit. Shortly thereafter Napolitano would become President of the Republic and finally King George. Last night he died and like every person who leaves this earth he must follow the condolences of those who loved him. But he remains the historical figure of a man full of contradictions.
Former fascistas one can be at seventeen, enrolled in the Fascist University Groups (GUF) in 1942, when the regime showed its cruelest face with the war and the racial laws of ’38, shortly afterwards it became one of the most orthodox Soviet communists. His words of support are history to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, serious mistake recognized many years later, once he became Head of State. Or how can we forget the words of Bettino Craxi who during Tangentopoli accused him of knowing everything about illicit financing of political parties, including his PCI which was almost never touched upon by the investigations.
Or his always uncritical Atlanticism, always aligned with the wishes of the American government of the moment, which came out in a bloody way in the season of destabilization of North Africa during the so-called Arab Springs.
History will judge Napolitano, I will always remember him with that “hat in hand” which surprised me so much from a man of power like him.
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