When dealing with politics in general, but especially with Italian politics, one can never be too suspicious, as the often-quoted Giulio Andreotti already recommended. He boasted of “being right” every time he thought badly, precisely, of something or someone.
The suspicion, fear, and whatever else that the harsh clash between Trump and Meloni, or vice versa, would end up being portrayed on the left and nearby as a staged act lasted only 24 hours. Trump “shocked” by the severely critical judgment expressed by Meloni on his attacks on the Pope, still or especially American, who does not share the apocalyptic wars that the President of the United States opens, leads, interrupts, and resumes to send the current enemy back to the “stone age.” Meloni shocked in turn by Trump’s reaction, who practically accused her of lacking the courage that he himself had internationally attributed to her by calling her “fantastic.” Shocked, I repeat, she too and proud to have sung louder than anyone else.
Comments and cartoons about the two “former friends” and the resulting foreign and domestic policy prospects have been wasted. But yesterday a newspaper that Giuseppe Conte himself said he reads every day, and perhaps sometimes inspires with the authority granted to him by the editor who considers him the best Prime Minister Italy has had since Camillo Benso di Cavour, shouted and printed in blood-red on the front page: “No break whatsoever.” It is naturally Marco Travaglio’s Il Fatto Quotidiano. This time it downgraded to useless the little column of Cattiveria that it places every day at the bottom of the page. Sometimes, I confess, even truly witty and effective in its brevity, almost Montanellian school style, which Travaglio frequented in his youth.
The proof of the staged act, of that “no break whatsoever,” was found or indicated in the intense military traffic at the American base in Aviano, in the North, where for quite a few weeks weapons and vehicles useful for the war against Iran have been transiting, recently blocked instead by the Italian government at the Sigonella base, in the South.
Conte, to return to him, “Giuseppi” as Trump once called him and the name stuck due to the variability of his opinions and majorities formed first at Palazzo Chigi and then outside, in the rather fake clash between the same Trump and Meloni, surprisingly managed to side, underneath it all, with the American president. Whom he considered “betrayed” – literally – for who knows what commitment Meloni had made to him and discarded to defend the Pope who electorally weighs more in Italy than elsewhere.
Even in the political and propaganda management of the break, real or presumed, between Trump and Meloni, the former Five Star prime minister found the occasion and the way to distinguish himself from the PD secretary by overtaking her in the race for the leadership of the broad alternative field to the center-right. And practically contesting, albeit among greetings and kisses when they meet in squares and corridors, the solidarity to the government expressed with institutional and bipartisan spirit, in the challenging Montecitorio chamber, after the attacks by the American president.
The so-called primaries remain, in short, with his ambition to return to Palazzo Chigi, at the center of Conte’s actions and thoughts. Walter Vetroni, the first PD secretary, must have thought critically of him, in this passage, among others, of his editorial in Corriere della Sera: “Everyone talking about primaries and imagining scenarios that will never happen, hazy, stale, convoluted that foresee, since everything is already won, who will go to Palazzo Chigi, who to the Quirinale, who to the presidency of the Chamber and Senate.”
