“We will not run away, we will not retreat. We will not take cover with Palace games to be paid for by Italians,” announces the determined Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. And so, forward to the end with this government, whose unity and solidity are reiterated. Also with thanks to the two deputy prime minister allies, Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani, who sit beside her in the Chamber, in what the opposition claimed should have been the most difficult briefing, after the referendum defeat suffered by the majority on the justice reform.
But the broad field or progressive field, as both Elly Schlein and Giuseppe Conte call it, now openly competing for leadership, although it came first with the No vote and by a wide margin, did not win, to paraphrase Pierluigi Bersani in the 2013 general elections.
That the opposition did not win on the general political level (there are general elections for that) at the referendum is certified by the defensive game they are forced to play both in the Chamber and the Senate. The Prime Minister surprises them by playing on the offensive, launching the challenge to become a “true alternative government,” to engage in confrontation on “real politics,” to make proposals including on foreign policy, recalling that her government is firmly opposed to “Palace alchemies, reshuffles, phases 2, 3, 4 dear to other majorities, to other prime ministers.” Meloni draws a deep line, destined to leave a mark, between her government and the previous ones where the left always governed for more than ten years. And she issues a warning: the next government will not be chosen with Palace alchemies, but like this one “through elections,” by the vote of Italians. We, the novelty, she emphasizes, “will be an anomaly, but we are against a politics that wants to survive itself” without taking on the burden of trying to “change things.” She reminds the opposition, quoting a phrase dear to Schlein, that if the PD secretary calls herself “stubbornly united” regarding a “variegated majority,” she, Meloni, can well say she is “stubbornly united” regarding the euro-Atlantic axis, that front of the united West that “has lasted for 80 years,” despite those asking her even to choose “between Europe and the USA.”
She responds to anti-Trumpism regardless, as propaganda, while recalling her criticisms of Trump, starting from tariffs and the “unshared war,” which other presidents before him (Obama and Biden) had already begun to shift their interests to the Indo-Pacific basin. But in response to the challenge, Schlein and Conte reply with the usual script of bickering against a “government that in 4 years has done zero reforms.” After having contributed to rejecting the very first one, that on justice reform, whose worksite, the Prime Minister warns, must remain open to bring Italy “to the level of Western democracies.”
The fact that Meloni mentioned Schlein twice might suggest superficial hypotheses that she sees her as the leader of the opposition. But that things are not like that and that in the “progressive field” the No victory, instead of tearing the government apart, has instead reignited the leadership war is actually said by Conte who hisses: “It will not be Meloni who decides who is the leader of the progressive field.” And in the end only Angelo Bonelli, leader of the Greens in Avs, with Nicola Fratoianni’s Left, says he is ready to go to early elections.
