D’Amato the pragmatic, from navigator of the left to anti-Covid frontman

ROME – There is a certain indication when a left-wing politician has the ambition to make a leap through an electoral challenge: the change of eyeglass frames. Alessio D’Amato he changed it: lightened, less section and more aperitif.

Now that the challenge is approaching that will see him as the center-left candidate for the presidency of the Lazio Region, the dominus of local health – first sub-commissioner when Lazio was in the face of instability, then councilor on the front line against the Covid emergency, in both cases alongside Nicola Zingaretti – he began to review his look: shorter hair, chromatic variations in the clothes, to darken his usual sugar paper suits with a few shades of blue: “We’ve never seen him without a jacket and tie”, say his colleagues in regional Council.

And they’ve seen it a lot in the last few years. Since the Covid emergency broke out, he has had a few weeks of vacation in all. In a camper, with his wife and son who plays football in the Amateurs. The springboard for his candidacy lies in the good management of the vaccination campaign, even if the detractors, who are never lacking, say that the efficiency of the regional machine has been achieved at the expense of other specialist services.

“If we don’t split up, we can win,” D’Amato tells a Republic. Defining it politically, rather than difficult, risks being useless. On the left, it’s on the left. He navigated almost all of them, the lefts: very young in the PCI, then Communist Refoundation, trend Armando Cossuttain fact comes out with the split of the Italian Communists, leaves the Pdci after a public controversy on the Palestinian question (he had a pro-Israeli point of view), then founds a Red-Green association together with Angelo Bonelliwhich now does not forgive him for being thrown by calendarfinally approaches the Democratic Party.

However, everyone agrees that its main quality is in pragmatism, organizational skills, workloads and little in ideology. Even his most trusted advisers keep together different stories from the family album: one is Esterino Montino, mayor of Fiumicino, historic exponent of the PCI-PDS-DS, who in the end could also be the president of the electoral committee; the other is Claudio Velardi, the former Dalemian Lothar, known through mutual friendships and a transversal political consultant for years. Velardi brings the relationship with the pollster as a dowry Alessandra GhisleriMontino brings his profound knowledge of the area and perhaps also the candidacy of his wife Monica Cirinnànot elected to the Politics.

For now they support D’Amato: Pd, Calenda and Renzi. In doubt: Bonelli and Fratoianni. Certainly against: the grillini. “You can win even without them”, is D’Amato’s certainty. Instead, D’Amato launches an appeal to the leaders of the Greens and the Italian Left: “With the whole coalition, I would like to present a program based on work, income from training, the environment and no to nuclear power. Let’s not make the mistake of delivering the Region to the right”.

Waiting to figure out who will be his challenger, D’Amato has to deal with two unpleasant events from the past, immediately ridden by his opponents. One is the conviction of the Court of Auditors for a story of over 15 years ago, a public loan of 260 thousand euros to the Italy-Amazon Association, another old creature of ours in tandem with Bonelli, which according to the sentence would have been used for different than expected.

The other is the agreement signed in the midst of the pandemic by the Spallanzani Institute, and supported by D’Amato himself, with the Gameleya Institute in Moscow: it provided for an exchange of information between Italian and Russian scientists. The Italians have never gone to Moscow, but the Russians have indeed come to Rome, and it is not yet very clear which sensitive data they have had access to. “No sensitive data”, swears D’Amato, who at that time was also a sponsor of the Sputnik vaccine. It should be noted that D’Amato then appointed a manager to manage Spallanzani Francesco Vaia, a name that perhaps does not say much to many, but whose story is well known to those who in the 00s read a successful investigative book on looting in Lazio health care signed by D’Amato, Lady Asl: one of the chapters was dedicated in Vaia. “In life – explains D’Amato – a second chance must be given to everyone. And in the pandemic Vaia has done an excellent job, so much so that he received one of the highest honors from Mattarella”.

Controversial issues that do not cancel the effectiveness with which D’Amato, meeting after meeting, ranting, brought the managers called to make the vaccination campaign work. Now D’Amato feels ready to convince the voters: “In life – he says – I owe everything to my mother, as a boy I worked on a construction site, in Pietralata I also suffered a serious injury with a circular saw. Mine is a clear story of left”.