Lorenzo Fontana: raised on bread, harvest and politics (and with a obsession for Putin)

It is the deputy who has no deputy opinions. Only solid, unshakable identity convictions that will make him the most conservative Speaker of the House ever. Lorenzo Fontana is an innumerable series of declinations of the League: father of a family (he has a daughter, his name already says a lot about the air you breathe at home: Angelica), long party militancy, years in the institutions, loyalty to the big boss, first Bossi then Salvini. All this starting from Saval, a humble neighborhood in the Veronese suburbs (quoted with a poignant tone to Scampia also in the settlement speech: “where the fate of every child seems to be marked”) next to Chievo but of a completely different urban planning and lineage (and media coverage). Where the then parish priest Don Renzo Zocca, in the 1980s, had already noticed, at a very young age, the mixture of religiosity and politics, which kept everything together. He played five-a-side football, a director role (more or less on the same side of the pitch as the other new president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa). He grew up on bread, masses and provincial congresses. His father was a Northern League player, he inherited their belonging and automatisms, he trained them on the gazebos, and then projected them towards a new dimension. More identity, precisely.

Gender darkens him. Anything that is not traditional family is out of the canon. Civil unions? A nihilistic raid. Her positions against abortion are known, on the various occasions between prolife conferences and family days in which she has had the opportunity to take part over the years. Salvini has never gone so far, he has always preferred to send him, he does not have that heritage and does not come from that history, even with the rosary in hand. But he has always trusted his judgment, his seriousness made manifest by wearing the most ordinary model of glasses there is, thick splints and rectangular lenses. Enough to appoint him as his deputy. These are all positions that Fontana reproached when he became Minister of the Family in the yellow-green government. And how did he take it? “I want to intervene to strengthen the counseling centers so as to try to dissuade women from aborting. I am Catholic, I do not hide it. And this is why I believe and also say that the family is the natural one, where a child must have a mother and a father“, he replied without too much brooding in an interview of those weeks.

Let us return, therefore, to solid convictions. And then they are the ones who, in a juncture between reasons of the heart and geopolitical situationism, led him to marry in all respects the cause of Vladimir Putin. “If thirty years ago Russia, under the Communist, materialist and internationalist yoke, was what can be imagined farthest from the ideas of identity and defense of the family and tradition, today it is the reference point for those who believe in an identity model of company “. An example to defend and follow, which Fontana propagated during his trips to Strasbourg, as a member of the European Parliament. When next to Salvini he wore a faded t-shirt with the writing in large letters. “Stop the sanctions on Russia”. Punctually, at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was asked if he had changed his mind. “It was another context. Now everything has changed. To say that we were pro Putin has always been a journalistic simplification”, he confessed in March to Il Foglio. Arguing that on sanctions it was necessary to follow the example of France, of the majority of European countries, reiterating our “Euro-Atlanticism”. This morning, in the courtyard of Montecitorio, he was reminded of the agreement signed by the League with United Russia, Putin’s party. Reply? “Never been to Russia. And the anti-sanctions shirts are from eight years ago.” In the meantime, he did not spare himself in asking Europe to return to its “Christian roots”.

A supporter of Hellas, the blackest team in Italy, he joked at length, when they alluded to the possibility that it would become the third position in the state, on football issues: “I don’t know anything, only about Giorgetti at Juve and me at Verona“. Bazzica il Bentegodi, is one of those deputies who do not use the territory for the catwalks, gives interviews to L’Arena, in Telenuovo, presides over his electorate (despite the fact that even in the city of Verona now the Brothers of Italy has tripled the votes of the Carroccio) And, in fact, they say that his election is a way to keep the Veneto leaguers at their best, who are already stirring up anti-Salvinian upheavals and revolts.

From the top of his three degrees, Political Science, History and Philosophy (at the Pontifical University of San Tommaso d’Aquino Angelico), he will try to do what he has been unanimously recognized: apologize if he is wrong, but do not stray from his own binding principles . Like when he was just a midfielder on an oratory team and he passed the ball to the others.