Massacre of Crotone, Salvini and the match in Piantedosi: “Total trust”. But the minister remains alone against the dem storm

ROME. Despite the opposition claiming his presence, Minister Matteo Salvini has no intention of appearing in Parliament and explaining why the Coast Guard – which depends on his Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport – remained to watch the night of the massacre at sea . Only the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, will be present. The other Matthew. And this naturally does not please the Democratic Party or the M5S, who consider him the real target. Salvini understood this and slips off, leaving the lit match to his colleague. «On the tragic story of Crotone – he makes the classic “League sources” say – there is total confidence in the work of Minister Matteo Piantedosi. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister Matteo Salvini has already expressed his assessments and will not add anything else. The League reiterates that the attacks on the Coast Guard are shameful and offensive.”

Next Tuesday, therefore, Piantedosi will make his report to the Chamber. He will have to dissolve the mystery that he himself fueled, again in Parliament, when he said in a sibylline tone: “If I said what the chain of command is, one would think that I am accusing this or that”.

And he had postponed the clarifications to next week. “I don’t want to be reticent. As to how it was decided that it was a police operation and not a rescue operation, I have to do some research”.

Here, the next day, when it is clear that he alone will be the one to face the criticisms, sources in the Interior Ministry are keen to point out that in any case «the minister is more calm than ever. When he said he was ready to assume his responsibilities, he made a fundamental premise “if there has been a weakness in the Ministry of the Interior”. And does the minister know that this weakness does not exist and cannot exist because where would our competences be?» .

An equal certainty, Salvini certainly cannot flaunt it. For this reason, the decision to send Piantedosi alone for the Northern League is an excellent one. Debora Serracchiani, the leader of the deputies of the Democratic Party, does not think so, who also yesterday insisted: “We are waiting for Minister Salvini to communicate the date of his information”. O Vittoria Baldino, M5S vice president in the Chamber: «We note the umpteenth escape of Minister Salvini from Parliament. We have already experienced in the past his fearfulness and reluctance to assume his responsibilities ».

In short, Piantedosi offers his chest. He shrugs at hearing talk of resignations or even a reshuffle. To those who have called him in these hours, he has repeated that he still feels “a prefect” and as such ready to take on responsibilities that are not his. After that, like two days ago in Parliament, he said yesterday to his interlocutors on the phone: «It was a fatality. If it hadn’t been for that shoal, the boat would have beached, everyone would have run away and we would have cataloged it as yet another ghost landing. There are dozens of them in Calabria».

For example, my colleague Francesco Lollobrigida, Minister of Agriculture and figure among those closest to Giorgia Meloni, called him, who had not been among the warmest in the heat. Lollobrigida later said this: “The responsibilities for the tragic sinking of the boat of migrants in Crotone are not linked to the Ministry of the Interior, but to the inability in recent years to curb the criminal looting that is done on human beings”. And to be even clearer: «The hypothesis of a reshuffle is meaningless».

Another who called Piantedosi to express his friendship and solidarity is Maurizio Gasparri, of Forza Italia: «I spoke to the minister to renew his full and convinced support for him. His action is exemplary. Very balanced.” Even Gasparri dismisses the idea of ​​a reshuffle as a boutade.

Meanwhile, yesterday, to make an encore of the action against Andrea Delmastro, the Greens-Left rushed to present a complaint also against Salvini and Piantedosi to the Rome prosecutor’s office. They argue: «In the opinion of the writers, the boat carrying 200 migrants in danger was treated as a case of illegal immigration and not as an urgent search and rescue event, also given the adverse weather conditions. And this is no small detail.”

It is a passage that worries both ministers, who at this point run the risk of ending up under investigation. But even this eventuality is soon liquidated by the Viminale. «For an omission of rescue to be conceivable, there must be the conditions for the rescue and that at that point, consciously, we have stopped. Everything that emerges so far, however, does not prove that there were these warning signs. On the contrary”.

It was a tragic fatality: this will be the Piantedosi trench. One of those tragedies that happen to governments of all kinds and colors. He already made a cryptic mention of it last Wednesday, when he concluded his speech to the constitutional affairs commission of the Chamber: “If we look at the deaths and tragedies of recent years, other similar episodes have occurred in the past”. The minister had two precise episodes in mind. March 1997, Prodi government: a Navy ship hits a cart in the Albanian sea and it is a massacre with at least 100 dead. October 2013, Letta government: a very short distance from Lampedusa a Libyan boat sinks and almost 400 passengers die, almost all Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants. Gasparri says: «I remember Berlusconi in ’97 on the Brindisi pier who brought solidarity and expressed pain. The opposition is also done like this. Now it’s their turn.”