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Fifty years ago Giovanni Spadolini entered the Senate

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Fifty years ago Giovanni Spadolini entered the Senate

I greet Minister Franceschini, the parliamentarians, the authoritative speakers, the President and all the guests of the Spadolini Nuova Antologia Foundation.

I warmly welcomed the initiative of the Foundation which with this meeting remembers the figure of the President of the Senate fifty years after his entry into Palazzo Madama.

Spadolini and the Senate have since become a duo that will remain inseparable until his death, first following re-election also in subsequent elections and then, on 2 May 1991, with the appointment as Senator for life by the President of the Republic Francesco Cossiga .

There will be many intense years in which Giovanni Spadolini will be called to cover multiple institutional roles with high responsibilities both in the parliamentary and in the governmental sphere, always leaving his original and unmistakable imprint. Already in July 1972 he was elected President of the Education Commission of the Senate; then, in 1974 he was “founder” Minister of the Ministry for cultural and environmental heritage, in 1979 Minister of public education, in June 1981 he was appointed President of the Council of Ministers (the first non-Christian Democrat President) and the following year he was called to form a second government; again, from 1983 to 1987 he was Minister of Defense.

To crown the deep bond with the Senate, at the beginning of the 10th Legislature, in July 1987, and again at the beginning of the following Legislature, in 1992, he was elected President of the Assembly of Palazzo Madama, which he leads with great authority and impartiality for seven years.

Let’s go back to 1972. Giovanni Spadolini arrives in politics without any previous party militancy, directly from civil society, from historical studies, from the professorship and from the experience of journalism culminating in the direction of important newspapers, most recently Il Corriere della Sera.

He is the expression of a cultural trend that connects him to the protagonists of national history who have contributed to creating – in his words – “a certain idea of ​​Italy”. It is the Gobettian trend of the “Risorgimento without heroes” and of the failed “liberal revolution”, whose myth – he wrote – served “to satisfy a demand and a ‘contemporary’ political imperative in the true sense of the word”.

To summarize the intense and multifaceted work of Giovanni Spadolini during the years of his public commitment, Professor Ceccuti used, in introducing his parliamentary speeches, a particularly effective expression: “Three lives in one: between journalism, history and policy”.

Reality is complex and needs the historian’s “tools” to be plumbed into its deepest roots, analyzed in the connections that can restore the sense of interdependence between apparently distant spheres, revealed as the result of ideas, actions, conditions.

But reality is also constantly evolving, it is constantly changing before our eyes. And here helps the attitude of the great and refined journalist in grasping the signs of the present, in sensing in time and reporting the developments, sometimes really unpredictable, of political, economic, social and cultural events.

In the face of reality, finally, one cannot remain mere spectators; the commitment is urgent, inspired by a high and noble vision of politics, projected towards a continuous improvement of the existing and able to “hive” the processes taking place in society, to manage them – also thanks to the knowledge of the historian -, finding the more adequate answers, mediating between the opposing interests, after having analyzed them and understood them in their intimate essence.

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The research of the historian, therefore, combined with political commitment, according to Mazzini’s teaching of “thought and action”. “There is no historical work that does not somehow absolve a civil action”, writes Spadolini in the preface of “The men who made Italy”, which significantly presents at the same time as “the rethinking of Italy of a century and more “but also as” the openness to debate, and to the research within ourselves, of today’s Italy, of the Italy that is around us, full of contradictions and lacerating tensions, but also of vital ferments of review and criticism “.

A close connection, that between history and politics, which emerges from his first speech in the Senate, on the occasion of the debate on trust in the Andreotti government on July 13, 1972. “There is a tradition in the reforms and renewals that are necessary that we all must save: the tradition of the Risorgimento, the tradition by which Italy has been transformed into a civilized and modern country “. Where the reference is to the values ​​of reason and tolerance in the political confrontation between opposing views.

A question in which the profiles of method and merit appear absolutely inseparable and which represents a sort of manifesto of his political and institutional commitment.

It is the reference to the “Italy of reason” that is found developed, on institutional ground, in his investiture speech as President of the Senate on July 2, 1987 in a strong defense of the primacy of Parliament: “The difficult government of the state would be impossible if here in Parliament those critical working conditions were not achieved, made up of projects and counter-projects, nourished by the culture of government and the proactive force of the opposition that makes the parliamentary regime alive and vital ».

He claims the constitutional reasons of parliamentary centrality “against any attempt to reduce the value of the parliamentary passage to mere ratification, formal fulfillment or room for mediocre and particularistic negotiations”.

He quotes Hegel, recalling the image of Parliament “as an institution-arcade” between the State and civil society, admonishing that “not only the democratic legitimacy but the very technical effectiveness of political decisions is profoundly conditioned by the work of the Chambers”.

The President is the “institutional guarantor” of the Senate, “guardian of the Regulations, of the rights of the majority and of those of the opposition” and undertakes to defend the good of parliamentary centrality “with the conviction that the work of the Chambers is never useless, not even when the shortcuts of the Executive or, at the other extreme, the plebiscite techniques seem easier or more politically profitable ».

It seems to echo what he had affirmed on August 30, 1982, in the investiture speech of his second government, when he recalled that “to an institutionally strong government there is a strong Parliament, a weak government corresponds to a weak Parliament”.

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It therefore appears clear to him that it is up to Parliament to be able to find adequate responses to the many “changes that have taken place, in forty years, in the material constitution: in the parties, in their relations with the institutions, in the economy and in the institutions that govern it, in the different perception of individual and trade union rights and freedoms on the part of citizens “.

During the years of his presidency of the Senate, there are two main moments that characterize the development of what we could define as an “institutional program”.

First of all, the start of the reform of bicameralism, the solution that emerges from the work of the Senate is that of the so-called procedural bicameralism.

“Chamber and Senate remain equal components of a Parliament conceived – as in the will of the constituents – in a unitary way, with identical powers and with the same dignity, eliminating however that duplication, those procedural delays, those repetitions that are now incomprehensible and unjustifiable”. In summary, double reading is necessarily required only for a limited number of laws (constitutional, electoral, legislative delegation, authorization to ratify international treaties, approval of budgets and final accounts, conversion of decree-laws).

For the other measures, on the other hand, simplified forms of examination are established, providing for a second reading only upon express request.

“It corresponds – underlines Spadolini with pride – to the first form of self-judgment and self-correction that Parliament has given of itself in over forty years”.

The Regulation resulting from the amendments maintains in any case the role of the President of the Assembly, to whom are attributed “functions now propulsive, now of control, now of mediation, now of guarantee of all political forces: all in the interest of ensure the full functionality of the Senate and its organs “.

These are powers and functions that Spadolini fully exercises, making a contribution of balance and reasoned comparison.

“My effort – he recalled in his inauguration speech to the Presidency of the Senate of the XI Legislature – was constantly to identify points of balance between divergent and irreconcilable theses, opposing the line of mediation and connection to that of opposition and rupture, according to those super partes characteristics that are proper and inherent to the institutional function of President of the Senate “.

On the strength of this auctoritas, on that same occasion he underlines with concern that there is a profound fracture to be recomposed between political society and civil society, which translates into a crisis of political participation, in the awareness, moreover, that it is not a whole phenomenon. and only Italian. And once again the scholar’s analysis is the starting point and the foundation of political action.

In his opinion, it is the duty of Parliament to continue to represent a solid and authoritative point of reference, capable of reconstructing the cracked pact between citizens and institutions, with a real effort to understand existing emergencies. There are many issues that are close to his heart and to which he returns several times, pointing out the urgency of action: the question of national unity, the fight against terrorism and mafias, economic recovery and social and territorial imbalances, the question moral, the firm condemnation and the fight against all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, the protection of cultural heritage, the conquest of more advanced levels of European integration.

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Giovanni Spadolini loves dialogue with the past. He feels, in Palazzo Giustiniani, the still living presence of Enrico De Nicola, but at the same time he lives well immersed in the present. He opens the doors to Italian and foreign scholars to welcome debates that support parliamentary decisions with deep and accurate critical reflections. He weaves a dense network of relationships with universities, cultural and research institutions, in many of which he also holds institutional leadership roles. He gives a strong impulse to the so-called parliamentary diplomacy, traveling a lot and receiving foreign authorities and delegations with which he establishes ties that are destined to last.

And of all this intense activity he leaves traces in articles, elzeviri, essays which he then brings together in volumes that return the becoming of a world in constant transformation.

“An Italian” is the inscription that he wanted to be engraved on his tomb in San Miniato, from where the gaze embraces the whole of Florence. And allow me to say that Giovanni Spadolini could rightly be defined as “a European Italian”, in the sign of the ancient Mazzinian tradition.

“Italy – he wrote – was born as an essential part of Europe, felt as a common civilization”. And several times he stressed the need for an ever more united Europe on the political level as ubi consistam necessary to meet the numerous challenges that were emerging within the individual countries and at the international level. But always in the awareness that «without the homelands, seated on their moral foundation, there would be no Europe. This mysterious and indecipherable word, which draws its light from the components that contribute, each one, to form it ».

Our thoughts turn to the enlightening analogy outlined by Benedetto Croce in “History of Europe in the 19th century” that Spadolini – as a European Italian – liked to quote: “in the way that, seventy years ago – Croce wrote in 1931, in a historical moment already very critical and on the eve of terrible events – a Neapolitan of the ancient kingdom or a Piedmontese of the subalpine kingdom became Italians not by denying their previous existence but by raising it and resolving it in that new being, so it is French and Germans and Italians and all the others will rise to Europeans and their thoughts will turn to Europe and their hearts will beat for her as before for the smaller homelands, not already forgotten, but better loved ». An auspice and a hope that still resonate today.

* (Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, President of the Senate)

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