20 October 2021 14:00
In the end, the Democratic Party won. However, given the size and quality of the abstention, this victory seems to be due mostly to the inconsistency of the opponents. The right, however, still appears strong in the country, beyond the big cities where it has just been voted. With these premises, more than about who won, it seems interesting to try to think about who lost. And to have lost it was above all Giorgia Meloni who on this occasion would have wanted to definitively take the leadership of the right, taking it away from a Salvini already in trouble for some time. Things turned out differently.
That just remedied is not Giorgia Meloni’s first defeat. In Rome, in the 2016 Campidoglio race, he also collected one in first person. But it is the first time that his defeat is so politically significant, far beyond what the numbers tell. And this is also due to some mistakes she made herself. Among these, two are perhaps the most significant for what they tell about her.
The first concerns the choice of the candidate for mayor of Rome, Enrico Michetti. Character unknown to most, he appeared at least not suited to the role, and not only for some of his disconcerting statements about shoah or on the presence of foreign rescuers in Rigopiano. But above all he appeared devoid of political arguments to spend, except that of being the candidate wanted by Meloni. The gravity of this choice seems perhaps mitigated in the eyes of those unfamiliar with the Roman political history of the last forty years. However, it will be enough to remember the strength that the right has always managed to express in the capital and the very solid roots in the territory. Meloni has partly tainted the work done in recent decades by many before her, showing an evident inability to lead.
Incomprehensible reasons
The second mistake is the response to the neo-fascist assault on the national headquarters of the CGIL. Meloni condemned him as a squad without uttering the word fascism, a ballast that she too has evidently decided to carry on her shoulders for truly incomprehensible reasons in 2021. In fact, she said she did not have a clear matrix of that assault, despite the images told it so explicitly that not seeing it can only be the result of a choice or a serious myopia that she had not yet shown. Perhaps few will remember it but in 2002 a small group of young right-wingers went to the Vascello theater in Rome to contest a show on April 25th. Even without denying his identity, Meloni’s sentence, at the time he was 25 years old and leader of Youth Action, was decidedly more clear-cut and crystalline than the opaque and insufficient one of Meloni today leader of the Brothers of Italy. But perhaps in 2002 the thrust of Fiuggi’s turning point was still felt strong. In any case, in this story Giorgia Meloni more than a step back from her own personal history, showed all her political limitations with worrying clarity, compromising the image of herself that she had built up to now.
The consequences of the internal battle risk being much more serious than the failure remedied in Rome and Milan
If this could have happened, if in short, if the conduct of these weeks of electoral campaign forced the emergence of his limits of leadership and political capacity, this is mainly due to two circumstances. The first is the loneliness of Meloni herself in her party, having surrounded herself with a more than inconsistent ruling class, at times even picturesque and a source of embarrassment, however politically unable to bear any comparison even with what the popular right expressed even in years not too far.
The second is the wear and tear caused by the race that Meloni has long engaged with Matteo Salvini for driving on the right. The consequences of this internal battle are now likely to be much more serious than the failure remedied in Rome and Milan.
In fact, if this administrative vote was to contribute to defining the leadership of the right, the result obtained is the worst possible for the right which now finds itself without a guide capable of dragging the electorate. And, perhaps, even without any more credible candidates for that role, as the political figures of Salvini and Meloni are quite bruised.
A point in favor of the moderates
If Salvini has appeared decidedly in difficulty since the summer of Papeete, Giorgia Meloni has in fact put herself in the same condition due to gross errors of political strategy very similar to those committed in the past by the leader of the League. And it will be remembered that just after the summer of Papeete, Salvini had had to take note of the emergence of an internal opposition in his own party, which later became a political fact with the arrival of Mario Draghi in government and the affirmation of Giancarlo Giorgetti. But that’s not all yet.
While the candidates wanted by Meloni and Salvini in Rome and Milan were losing ruinously against the candidates cast by the Democratic Party, and while elsewhere even candidates close to Giorgetti were losing, the only ones on the right capable of winning in elections of a certain importance were two close politicians. to Silvio Berlusconi: Roberto Occhiuto, new president of Calabria, and Roberto Dipiazza, reconfirmed mayor of Trieste. And this from the symbolic point of view has further burdened the defeat of Salvini and Meloni while from the political point of view it marked a point in favor of the moderates and a defeat for those who have been riding sovereignty for some time.
What will happen in the coming months is difficult to predict, such and such is the amount of unexpressed votes to which we must add the strength that, as mentioned, the right is still capable of expressing in the country and that will more easily be mobilized in the upcoming elections. policies. To say that the center-left did not win is obviously wrong, however the victory seems less clear than the declarations of the democratic leadership would like, despite the five stars that have almost disappeared from the scene and the right that seems to have a still solid electoral base, but not a ruling class able to intercept it.
If this is the situation, the resulting political framework appears to be blocked. The white semester will only end with the election of the new head of state in February and this game is increasingly the horizon within which every move of each of the players on the field will be read. Here then is that the decisions on citizenship income and quota 100, together with the re-emerging debate on the electoral law and the decision on the date of the next political vote, will very soon give the keys to understand who, among the parties, will have had the strength to sit down to head of the table. And maybe they will also say something about Mario Draghi’s future.
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