Giulia Bongiorno says she believes in the justice and impartiality of the magistrates. However, she explains that “the fear of some reckless action by politicized magistrates is always there”. The senator of the Lega thus joins the many who in recent weeks have referred to the possibility of a legal incident – perhaps the opening of an investigation or the sending of a guarantee notice – which could damage the right before the vote .
Before her, Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto, both of Fratelli d’Italia, and the director of Libero Alessandro Sallusti, among others, evoked this risk, during an electoral campaign that, among dossiers, papers of secret services and insults, is among the most poisonous and opaque that they remember.
However, Bongiorno’s words are particularly striking. For her political and professional history, of course, but above all because, in the event of an electoral victory by the right, she could become the minister of justice. This, at least, is the desire expressed by the leader of the Lega Matteo Salvini. The other name that is circulating for that position is that of Carlo Nordio, a former prosecutor of Venice now retired, a candidate with the Brothers of Italy.
The one in progress between the two is almost a derby, also played to the sound of interviews with newspapers. In the last week of August alone there are four of Nordio’s: a Quotidiano Nazionale, Corriere del Veneto, Stampa and Repubblica. Another had given it to the newspaper Domani a few days earlier.
It is the first time this has happened since the time of Tangentopoli and of the investigations of Clean Hands
Nordio says that politics must regain possession of its role, legitimized by the popular vote, and stop being, “as it has been for thirty years, subordinate to the judiciary”. And here, then, is the proposal to reintroduce parliamentary immunity. Or that of separating the careers of judges and prosecutors, and of “a total revision of the functions and powers of the prosecutor”.
And then much more: from the inappellability of first instance acquittal sentences to the elimination of the crime of abuse of office. A government program, in fact. Or the completion of a “Berlusconi project started years ago”, as the former president of the national magistrates association Eugenio Albamonte said.
And Bongiorno also commented negatively on Nordio’s words, in particular the proposal on parliamentary immunity, explaining that “the issue is not in the program of the center-right, much less in that of the League”. It is “better to think of citizens before parliamentarians”, he concluded. Politically it looks like a slap.
As is evident, an implied but looming presence in many of these arguments is that of Silvio Berlusconi, who has often returned to justice in recent weeks, however, fetching out old ideas, and without too much conviction, as in a tired re-proposition of a written script. on stage already thirty years ago. But that was another world.
And the point is probably just this: beyond some personalism, as the Nordio-Bongiorno duel seems to be, justice has so far been almost completely absent from the electoral campaign, and it is the first time it has happened since the time of Tangentopoli and of the anti-corruption investigations that have gone down in history with the name of Clean Hands.
From one point of view, it’s not necessarily bad for the country. It is not especially so if we consider how in the last thirty years questions relating to justice have monopolized the public debate, mostly suffocating it among the so-called laws to the person chased by the right to avoid Silvio Berlusconi from some judicial trouble, and the center-left’s justicialist response.
Not to mention a judicial power to which, starting from the nineties of the twentieth century, a part of the political world and of society has delegated a role of moralization which, however, is not reflected in the laws and in the constitution. That role then dissolved amidst the scandals that recently engulfed the judiciary, reducing it to a condition comparable to that in which the parties of the first republic found themselves involved in judicial inquiries on corruption.
And perhaps even this forced rebalancing between powers, although oriented to the downside and due to a sharp decline in authority both of political forces and of the judiciary, has helped to bring justice out of the electoral campaign, or at least to cool the tone.
It is also very significant in this sense that Silvio Berlusconi in a long interview recently released to Corriere della Sera never uttered the word “justice”, nor did he give a thought to the subject, not even to lash out at that part of the magistrates who has always considered it politicized. Even when asked about the political legacy of his governments, he answered with a long list in which he included the most disparate topics, from the abolition of conscription to the law against smoking, except justice.
In short, it is as if an era had ended. On the other hand, even the magistrates seem to share the same weariness. Among the candidates in the elections there are no magistrates currently in office. A little because, as Liana Milella writes in Repubblica, “the Cartabia-Bonafede law forever forbids active return to the judiciary once the office is over”. And partly because “the myth of the magistrate who temporarily hangs up his toga to dive into politics has dissolved”.
On the lists, on the other hand, there are already retired magistrates. There is Nordio, as mentioned. And there are some former magistrates with a long experience of working on organized crime such as the former attorney general of Palermo Roberto Scarpinato, or the former national anti-mafia prosecutor Federico Cafiero de Raho, both candidates from the 5-star Movement. De Raho, however, follows the path already trodden by his predecessors Piero Grasso and Franco Roberti, also at the top of the national anti-mafia prosecutor and candidates after retiring.
And this “electoral collection of togas”, as Luigi Ferrarella defined it in the Corriere della Sera, together with the “batch of definitive convicts who, in general disinterest, are about to crowd the lists of the right”, shows “that the polls of 25 September already propose a result: the substantial irrelevance of the issue of justice, and its downgrading to a pure landscape, a warehouse for collateral disputes “.
And to say that there would be themes instead. Beyond the debates on major reforms, just remember the alarm launched just recently by the vice-president of the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM) David Ermini according to which “we are short of judges and we will be until 2024, so let’s get ready to face a serious emergency “.
The Democratic Party was enchanted by the danger of the return of fascism, ignoring other issues
Or that, to move on to the political level, the electoral result of the vote of 25 September, if the current predictions prove correct, could allow the right – as reported by the newspapers Avvenire and Manifesto – a majority such as to be able to change the constitution without the need to submit the changes to a referendum, but also to appoint the secular members of the CSM and the judges of the constitutional court in solitude for the share due to the chambers.
These are bodies that occupy a position of extreme importance in the institutional architecture: the CSM because it governs the judicial system, consults it because it is the highest guaranteeing body of the institutional system.
This means that this time the right could do everything that Berlusconi did not succeed, having found in the years in which he was in government an insurmountable wall to protect the institutions and the constitution represented precisely by the guarantee offered by the constitutional court.
Yet, justice and issues that are open or that could open up after the vote, no matter how serious, evidently no longer seem so important. The electoral propaganda of the Democratic Party seems to have been enchanted by the danger of the return of fascism, without considering other issues. The right remains silent and, if things go as the polls say, will thank you.