The envy of the left voters for Meloni | They are all right

There is a widespread feeling among the people of the left, for many even unconfessable: to envy Giorgia Meloni to the right. Not the positions of Meloni, of course. Not even the fact that he won the elections, just as he did. The envy is this: for Meloni’s evident, sincere concern never to lose contact with the political community that has expressed its leadership. Meloni has adjusted the line on some issues that risked creating problems for her, but she was careful never to break, neither in the electoral campaign and even less in previous years, the emotional connection with the base of her electorate.

An anxiety so urgent that it even pushes it into unacceptable, let’s even say scandalous, positions, as in its pharisaic reconstruction of the history of the nation and its party. Meloni, who in his speech to the Chamber cites anti-fascism only to brand it as a murderer, killer of “innocent children”, carries out a vulgar work of revisionism and mystification whose purpose is clear, speak to his followers – say: I am here but I am not changed – to preserve the sense of otherness of the Missina community in which it was formed. The self-perception of oneself as Christians persecuted in the catacombs for the courage of their own ideas is a founding (and self-deceptive) trait of the neo or post-fascist right born on the ashes of the Social Republic, arrived intact until the nineties, when Meloni as a young girl met in ruin of Colle Oppio in Rome together with the comrades of her current of Msi-An, the Seagulls, many of whom are now in government with her. It was not egotism, her reference to her personal story in that speech. It was to point out that she, at Palazzo Chigi, arrived there thanks to her ideas and even more despite her ideas, despite the fact that she has always renounced to abjure them, even claiming them in the solemn moment in which everyone expected a turning point, an opening, perhaps even just a hypocritical concession.

After all, the Prime Minister had made it clear a few days before the elections, guest of a program of what would become her Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano: “This victory is the redemption of those who for decades had to lower their heads”. He certainly did not refer in general to the center-right voters, who in recent decades have governed all right, and with Meloni’s own party in the majority. He was referring to the missini. To his community of veterans. When he says “we will not betray”, it is to them that he speaks. When he expresses sympathy for the young people who will go to the streets against her, true or false, he is emphasizing that this is her story: from the square to Palazzo Chigi, without shortcuts.

Meloni’s historiographical vision is bad for the country. All those who fear his government of him see it well, even for the perverse work of rewriting the past that he will try to do. Many of the detractors, however, cannot fail to appreciate the design of a parable where politics, belonging, respect for the roots dominate rather than the search for technocratic compromise, the foreign pope, laboratory alchemy such as the one that tried to transform an accidental experience of government between the Democratic Party and the M5S in a political formula unworthily passed off as a “new center left”.

Be careful not to misunderstand: envy for Meloni is not a specular demand for extremism, admitted and not granted that Meloni today can be considered an extremist. It is not that mere request for a left turn invoked by a part of public opinion or by those small parties that claim to already practice it and collect the zero point in the polls. What many leftist voters lack is leadership with the courage of ideas and the credibility to carry them forward. What is missing is a boss who is able at the same time to pursue their own personal designs and keep them anchored to a path, a feeling, a sharing.

Today, in view of the congress, it is clear that the old leadership group of the Democratic Party could take any direction – Peronist, centrist, Labor – but it would all be read as a tactical move, because from a certain point on none of those leaders has shown that knowing how to take care of nothing other than the self-preservation of a nomenclature, not to mention who, how Matteo Renzihe has practically dedicated his entire mandate as secretary to picking up the relationship with his own base, without, however, in the meantime succeeding in capturing that of others.

There is a very significant criticism of Meloni of the state of affairs, said the deputy dem Lia Quartapelle: “Meloni – said Quartapelle – gave a speech as a girl on the part of Garbatella rather than as prime minister”. Unfortunately, you betray the idea, cultivated more or less consciously in recent years on the left, that the prime minister is a sort of justice of the peace, a guarantor of balance, a windshield holy card. Perhaps instead, for years, the problem of the Democratic Party has been just the opposite of what Quartapelle reproaches Meloni: a party full of figures who would be able to deliver great and smooth speeches as prime minister and without anyone who would know or could do it as a boy of part of Cernusco sul Naviglio or as a girl of part of Eboli.