Giuseppe Conte is the smartest and most incredible figure to have appeared on the political scene in years. He emerges from nowhere with a mysterious magic trick that still makes us wonder how President Sergio Mattarella accepted his candidacy as prime minister of the yellow-green government (some say they know the answer but prefer to keep it to themselves); just as things get going, Covid arrives and he reassures Italians live on TV that the government has the situation under maximum control, the disaster we all know happens and he boasts day after day of having saved the country (many Italians believed him, after all he was the only pilot in the cockpit of the craziest plane in the world called Italy); he invents abolishing poverty but actually abolishes about thirty billion poorly counted with the failed citizenship income; not satisfied, he invents the superbonus which helps some rich gentlemen renovate villas and even castles for free but creates the largest debt in the history of the Republic (Istat estimates it at over two hundred billion, stuff we will pay for a couple of generations); he is the only one who managed to fool that visionary Casaleggio and the King of trickery Beppe Grillo, from whom he snatches the party that poor Beppe is still trying to understand how it could happen; from leader of a small party at ten percent (the Five Star Movement) he holds the largest party of the European and perhaps world left (the PD hovering above 20) hostage, demanding to command a company – the Broad Field – of which he is a minority partner; he keeps the judiciary away from the embarrassing financial disasters of his partner which, just by looking inside, is far worse than the Santanchè case.
And now, called to answer for affairs and misdeeds committed during his management of Covid, the latest dramatic move: he agrees to be questioned by the parliamentary inquiry commission but arranges things so that it cannot happen, a colossal embarrassment for two-thirds of the parliamentarians who were waiting for him at the gate. Conte is a genius, an evil one but a genius. Giuseppe Prezzolini said: «In Italy the clever one is always in a place he earned not for his abilities, but for his skill in pretending to have them».
