Four days before the umpteenth and always painful anniversary – the 48th – of that horrible and painful death, by bleeding, inflicted by the Red Brigades on Aldo Moro after 55 days of captivity, today at the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome, the Pd secretary Elly Schlein, the former minister Dario Franceschini, of Christian Democratic origin, and the almost lifelong senator Pier Ferdinando Casini, also of Christian Democratic origin and now a regular guest on the Nazareno lists to keep the seat at Palazzo Madama, met to commemorate and discuss with the authors of a newly released book about the late statesman.
“Aldo Moro, the ideas, the method, the legacy” is the title of the volume written by the Pd lawyers and politicians Tino Iannuzzi and Alberto Losacco, to whom Casini provided a heartfelt testimony in the preface, although in his distant and long Christian Democratic militancy he was never a Moro supporter. He was rather a Doroteo, that is, of the faction that ousted Moro from Palazzo Chigi in 1968, despite not having lost the elections after almost five years of government, and then a Forlanian. Of a Forlani, however – I recall honestly as a journalist and analyst – who had been the most Moro-like of the Fanfanians, pleased with an article in which I had portrayed him – “dismembered,” he jokingly told me – between “the heart with Fanfani and the brain with Moro.” Different times, different men, alas.
It is strange that the Pd, born from the “cold” and “unsuccessful” fusion, as Massimo D’Alema defined it at the resignation of its first secretary Walter Veltroni, between the remains of the PCI and the Christian Democratic left, but not only, has not managed to inherit from Moro the art of mediation. With which he was able to keep the DC united in all the phases of his life, even the most difficult ones. “Better to be wrong together than to be right alone,” he said, winning from the Christian Democratic parliamentarians, shortly before his tragic kidnapping, their reluctant but united consent to the second and last edition of the single-party Christian Democratic government of “national solidarity” led by Giulio Andreotti, supported by Enrico Berlinguer’s PCI no longer with abstention as the first time but with a confidence agreed around a well-defined program.
Schlein – blessed girl, I feel like writing thinking of her recently turned 41 years, to whom I send my best wishes – continuously loses people along the way, individually or in small groups, generally of Christian Democratic and moderate origin. The latest departure is that of my personal and dear friend Marianna Madia, former minister in Matteo Renzi’s government and then Paolo Gentiloni’s. Poor thing, she couldn’t stand anymore the “stubbornly unitary” political management of the party, says Schlein, but thinking only of the goal of the agreement, externally, with Giuseppe Conte. And perhaps hoping to defeat his candidacy for Palazzo Chigi in the primaries demanded by the former premier himself as “the most open possible,” that is, more confused. Similar to those that brought Schlein to Nazareno overturning the majority of the congress members gathered by Stefano Bonaccini.
Marianna – compliments to the niece worthy of the best friend I had in the journalistic profession, Normanno Messina, who for a joke was capable of risking even his job – was more recently preceded by MEP Elisabetta Gualmini and less recently, among others, by former minister Giuseppe Fioroni, president of the last parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Moro murder. Others I know are tempted by exodus at this point, perhaps before gaining certainty of being excluded from the candidate lists for the next elections, around which friends, advisers, and subordinates of the secretary are already working in anticipation of the usual rejected lists, closed to preference votes that everyone, or almost everyone, says they want to restore but no one really does. Sorry for the usual Andreotti malice.
