It is always with its proverbial irony, more or less sweet and more or less bitter, that history puts a hand in it. A bitter irony wanted it to be the turn of Liliana Segre, living witness of Auschwitz, to pass the baton of the second office of the state, the one that in case of necessity assumes the functions of guarantor of the constitution proper to the president of the republic, to a gentleman who the first name is Ignazio and the second Benito, who has repeatedly said to be honored to be defined a fascist and has repeatedly boasted of not being an anti-fascist, who in the seventies in Milan was known as “the comrade la brawl”, that the right arm arrogantly raised it in public more than once. Without the comfort of all the votes of Forza Italia and with the help of about twenty votes from the opposition, so as not to deny that the Italian comedy is always the Italian comedy, Ignazio La Russa is the new president of the senate. . He takes office with a tricky speech that is twenty-five minutes long, three more than the twenty-two employed by Liliana Segre before receiving a standing ovation very hot on the left side of the hemicycle, very warm on the right side.
Two speeches that are two programs. The liberal commentators, the same ones who for months have been engaged in an active work of preventive legitimation of the unborn Meloni government, are scrambling to add them together as if they were one, the program of reunification and national pacification. But they are wrong: the one, Segre, and the other, La Russa, each in their own way and both still loyal to the etiquette that the institutions want above the parties, trace again the line of the conflict between two ways of understanding the republic, the constitution, the national community.
From that irony of history that puts it in the right place at the wrong time, Segre does not let himself be harnessed. He makes it explicit, naming the “casual circumstance” of the coincidence between its temporary function (and the birth of a post-fascist-led majority, even if this is implicit) and the centenary of the march on Rome. He takes from his personal biography the memory of racist laws and deportation, which evidently sounds like a severe political reminder to the new parliament.
Then he rattles off one by one the conditions of a republican unity founded on “an essential core of shared values, respected institutions, recognized emblems”, and these are all conditions that give the winning right an allergy: anchoring to the constitution, “Testament of a hundred thousand who died in the struggle for freedom” which did not begin in 1943 but with the murder of Matteotti; the need to implement it, especially in the principle of equality, instead of getting itchy to change it; the convinced and non-ritual celebration of the anniversaries “carved in the great book of homeland history”, on April 25 that the right never wanted to honor, on May 1, June 2.
The last arrow is against the language of hatred and discrimination, and even this, although it has a transversal destination, is more striking in the field where diversity is called deviance. Moral: in a democracy the ballot boxes are sovereign and their response must be accepted, but the Italian constitutional democracy has a precise genealogy and path that must be respected and renewed. Segre has the authority and takes the liberty of saying it without too many compliments and without mincing words.
The president of the senate again in the chest he has brought her some white flowers as a gift, but he listens to her with evident disappointment. And he lies knowing he is lying when, once invested in the office, he states that “there is not a word of Segre that has not deserved my applause”, including those on the civil calendar of shared anniversaries. For the post-fascists it is time to search for legitimacy, ideological rather than political. La Russa is shrewd, she knows how to do it: now that they have won, they can profess unity to reaffirm and finally impose their version of their homeland history.
So the new president prompts due respect for the institutions and for the impartiality of the role that awaits him, but claims his entire militant partisan path. He replaces the hundred thousand dead of the resistance with the fallen “in uniform” in the so-called Italian peace missions. He pays homage From the Church, Falcone, Borsellino. He says of the constitution that it must instead be reformed, promising yet another bicameral assembly or the impossible constituent assembly that the center-right has longed for for thirty years.
Then comes the thrust into the seventies, because the tongue beats where the tooth hurts and among the post-fascists that is the tooth that hurts: “The hard, very hard moments of protest, of violence, of resistance to terrorism”. Not those of the massacres of the right and the state, no: those “of the many boys, of every political color, who lost their lives just because they believed in ideals”. Sergio Ramelli, “but also” Fausto and Iaio. Black or red for him are equal and for now it is enough to obtain this, the equalization of opposite extremisms under the heading “violence”. This is what Giorgia Meloni calls “the redemption of fallen brothers” and kept on the sidelines of national history by the discriminating anti-fascist that today the winning right can finally consider overthrown.
And that the rest is not wavering today. Clumsily and completely arbitrarily, La Russa quotes Sandro Pertini to glorify his ability to fight, in his youth, on the losing side of history, “without fear but also without hope”. More appropriate, shrewd and alas unassailable is the final quote that he reserves for the inauguration speech for the presidency of the chamber of Luciano Violante. “I do not need to repeat his words in full, but only the part that I hope will be more acceptable to all”, the one in which Violante advocated the common recognition of all the political parties, albeit with their distinctions and oppositions, “in a commonly shared system “. It was the year of grace 1996. In the part that La Russa shrewdly avoids mentioning, Violante equated the resistance fighters with the boys of Salò. Two years earlier, Berlusconi had cleared the post-fascists by welcoming them to the Pole of liberties, and the heir party of the PCI thought well not to be outdone.