Matteo Renzi is a sly one, we already knew perfectly well before he confirmed it by launching Silvia Salis like a bomb, aiming to detonate the script of the primaries among the opposition, explosive and gloomy at the same time. For a few days, the left can distract themselves from the anti-Meloni refrain and focus on their usual theme of self-harm, renewing Moretti’s theme of “let’s keep going like this, let’s hurt ourselves.”
Sure: if we look at style, between Giorgia’s cleaned-up fishwife and Schlein’s lesbian mussel, to define them with the insulting epithets popular in our social times, it’s clear that the attractive elegance of the former Genoese athlete stands out. We all understand it and the former Florentine premier knows it well, strong in the advantage-disadvantage that the return to Palazzo Chigi is certainly barred to him. An advantage, yes, in this paradoxical phase, in which politics almost aims more to lose than to win, to muddle along on the opposition benches, with the declaration of the day, rather than governing a basically unsolvable internal and international chaos.
That’s why, in the end, the battle might be attempted by someone who still believes in government politics, having practiced it successfully for a long time. And who, at this moment, to stay with Moretti’s doubts (Nanni remains the best singer of the losing progressive paradigms), prefers not to be noticed and to stay aside. We obviously refer to Stefano Bonaccini, emigrated from Bologna to Strasbourg almost without passing through Rome, careful to dose his sporadic and quick interventions, like the one given today to Il Giornale, hoping to ascend from the PD presidency to coalition leadership without passing through the party secretaryship.
More style than substance, in short. To be clear, the tactic also used by Calenda, who however as aspiring premier is “burned” as much as Renzi. The former Emilia governor seems instead the only presentable survivor as administrator of the national condominium, especially after Sergio Cofferati committed political suicide via referendum, a lesson Meloni should have memorized. The former CGIL leader, moreover, is not suitable also for age reasons: for the old there is rather the Quirinale, not Palazzo Chigi.
Meanwhile, what will become of Salis? It’s likely that style will not be enough for her. We are victims of an illusion, an optical distortion, especially us boomers to whom the algorithm proposes nostalgic reels. From Montanelli to Craxi, they all seem great gentlemen, maybe you don’t agree with what they say but what sobriety, what calmness… But things are not like that. Yesterday’s politics and society are the parents of today’s, we are not and we are not doing worse than the first republic, we succeed it. Those gentlemen (they are almost all men) in black and white, today, would give in like us to the accelerated rhythm of scrolling, would release occasional jokes, would shout in talk shows.
Sure, the right displays planet-wide unpresentable boors, from Trump to Orban who today faces Magyar: Hungarian and European democracy has found no better alternative to oppose him than a questionable secessionist. But style is not enough. Mattarella is venerated as an anti-Meloni stronghold, but the cordon of flattery protecting him from any criticism is cracking after the unwelcome pardon to Nicole Minetti, the Cavaliere’s dental hygienist. Who for the left remains the father of all the evils of our country, aesthetic and otherwise.
