The names of candidates for the Quirinale are covered to escape the confrontation with the requirements of a good head of state. Days pass, and the names of the real candidates for the Quirinale are always hidden, covered up. Except one, rumbling, known to all Italians. If democracy is first of all transparency, a loyal relationship between representatives and representatives, this is not an exemplary page today. An idea of representation prevails, even at this level, which looks not so much and no longer at the sovereign people, at the voters, but at the small circle of people and apparatuses that hold the parties in their hands, and therefore manage democratic institutions. With less and less collegial, democratic titles: who remembers the excited party congresses, the vivacity of the internal dialectic, the currents, the very aims of the parties? In summary, Article 49 of the constitution?
The mystery of the names requires clarifying the requirements of a good head of state; but even here nothing filters out of the party fortresses. Worse than on names. It is no coincidence, it is not superstition: clear requirements restrict the ability to choose, corner party interests. It is useful to put together the indications of the Constitution and the political and institutional experience of the past decades, to understand and update the content of concepts such as representation, defense of the Constitution, national unity, impartiality, equidistance from the various political positions; lastly, international reputation. In today’s framework, the ability to represent is essentially a moral requirement: the combination of intellectual honesty, credibility, reliability, personal prestige. Patriotism declined in peacetime. It is a sort of prerequisite, a preliminary title, a filter, a seal that then rests on specific skills and acts as their guarantor. For this reason, generic appeals, romantic such as those for a female president, or something similar, appear to be legitimate, but symbolic testimonies. Or for single figures, often extreme, which are usually produced by the power stations of the various populisms, far from any idea of constitutional unity. Today the function of a head of state – which has grown so disorderly that it cannot be codified, and perhaps still in the process of expansion, or definition – can be usefully embodied only in figures of the highest competence and profound institutional sensitivity, combined with great knowledge and political experience. . Politics originally even biased: a passion that allows you to appreciate and respect, alongside your own, the political passions of others, including distant ones. especially the distant ones, when the function requires it. Not the passive third party of the disengaged. For the sake of synthesis, and for its clarity on its future, we can use what we can define the “Mattarella model”: strong political passion, disjointed from ambition for personal success, collegial commitment. Politics as a comparison, for those who remember something similar. A natural figure in the first Republic, when leaderships were the result of confrontation within communities built on similar ideas, and not exercises of strength and domination. Figures that gradually dispersed in the selfishness of personal parties, and for this reason obsolete in the generations following the first decades of the Republic, due to incompatibility of political culture. Some “exemplary” examples remain: it is not a play on words: or at least, it is not just that.
A useful warning: the election of the head of state is not a competition based on qualifications, not even for those that seem more similar. If the main victims of the institutional vandalisms of the last decades are the Chambers, as we see every day, it is not the case to consider the membership of the small corporation of those who presided over them a credential. To it we owe the admission, in violation of Article 72 of the Constitution, of the deleterious maxi-amendments with a built-in question of trust. Finally: the danger of a “divisive” president exists only when divisiveness is exercised outside, if not even against the Constitution. Not among the men of the Constitution itself. For this, the search for requirements is important and subtle; for this reason the temptation of a mediocre political power to evade it is irresistible, it is very dangerous.