«The man from Foggia enters through the side door and positions himself in the middle of the room.» This Apulian proverb was born long before the lawyer from Volturara Appula entered politics, but he has taken it literally. The day after the hearing in the Covid Commission, Giuseppe Conte continues to speak without listening to the interlocutor, as he did on Thursday afternoon during the three hours of self-celebratory speech in front of the deputies. The M5S leader aims high, shoots at Giorgia Meloni, in an attempt to elevate himself to the level of the only possible rival to the prime minister.
The opportunity the grillino clings to is the social media post with which the leader of Brothers of Italy responded to the accusations he made during the hearing. «This commission is a firing squad and Meloni is the director,» Conte said, using the expression that after the referendum cost Giusi Bartolozzi her position as chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice. «The truth about the pandemic is not a political attack nor a trial of a person but a right of Italians and a duty towards the Nation,» was the prime minister’s reply, who wonders why the grillino leader «decided to turn it into politics instead of joining the chorus of those asking for answers to the many unanswered questions».
«Unlike Giuseppe,» Giorgia concluded, «I am not interested in turning a tragedy that has marked millions of Italians into a personal battleground, a typical M5S method, used to replace the search for truth with suspicion.» Shortly after, the interested party responded again via social media: «I was hours in the Commission, you have five minutes to answer about Andrea Delmastro’s secret chats, Daniela Santanché’s trials, or the center-right Regions you didn’t bring up in the Covid investigation?» The question was repeated within a few hours.
The challenge of public appreciation on the web was won by the prime minister, who doubled the grillino, but the so-called “likes” victory was not Giuseppi’s goal. The objective, achieved, was to corner and overshadow Elly Schlein once again, who has not yet recovered from the blow the M5S leader dealt her last Sunday, when she took breaking positions on foreign policy and challenged her in the primaries, where the broad field’s people will decide the political line. There the former prime minister made her understand that he, unlike her, also has a plan B, whether the primaries do not take place or she does not win, namely breaking the alliance and taking the Movement to vote alone, as in 2022.
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There are the silences of two women that influence Conte. The first is Meloni’s, which the former prime minister suffers from greatly and desperately tries to break. With that phrase about the firing squad, he succeeded for once and indeed rode it in every way. The more she attacks him, the more he feels important and invested in the role of aspiring rival. The second is Schlein’s, which on the contrary intoxicates him, because the more she is silent, the more he senses her weakness. Also, the fact that she did not defend him from the attacks received in the Commission was interpreted as a sign that she fears him, does not want to support him.
Not all of the PD, however, is with the secretary. Even Dario Franceschini and Francesco Boccia, who at the time of the primaries claimed the paternity of Elly’s candidacy, would not want to see her compete with Meloni. They fear the comparison would crush her and are convinced she is not yet ready, or perhaps is simply unsuitable. She knows this and claims she pays the price for being a woman and moreover homosexual, but it is not so: the rejection is political. It seems that the senior Dems proposed she step back in favor of an iconic elder statesman, who could also be acceptable to M5S, for example Pierluigi Bersani, promising her the Foreign Ministry in exchange. She would have refused and this is Conte’s real strength, because it authorizes him to hold his ground even though he leads the coalition’s second force and not the first. In Elly’s silence, Francesco Boccia moved to defend the grillino leader on the Dem side, with the excuse that, as Minister of Regional Affairs, he was also on the front line during Covid. «Conte’s hearing dismantled two years of shameful right-wing propaganda and put the facts back in their place, restoring dignity to one of the Republic’s most painful but also highest pages,» said the PD group leader in the Senate.
He also spoke of “firing squad” (so is the expression now cleared and can be used by center-right figures as well?; editor’s note) and even defended the revocation by then extraordinary commissioner Domenico Arcuri of the contract with Jc Electronics for the supply of masks, which cost the government a two hundred million compensation, later settled to one hundred by this government. An attack on Meloni that however hurts Schlein more. Parliament now goes on holiday until September 1 but it will not be three weeks of peace in the broad field. Conte will continue to try to pick fights with Meloni, who is one of the two pillars of his electoral campaign; the other is to mimic Roberto Vannacci from the left. Schlein will continue to claim she wants to prioritize identifying a shared program over choosing the leader, knowing however that they will not even manage to write the first line. At the resumption, in the Covid Commission, probably on September 14, the grillino leader will reappear. «But we will also summon Roberto Speranza,» who was Minister of Health during the pandemic, Fdi says. And this occasion will also be exploited by the former prime minister for propaganda.
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