To the polls! Mario Draghi throws in the towel for good

Mario Draghi has thrown in the towel for good and the President of the Republic has surrendered to the evidence. It's off to vote: next September 25, Italy will have a new government.

This is the first time in the history of the Italian Republic that a government with a very large majority, including even the so-called "opposition forces”, has unraveled at the behest of its prime minister despite having the confidence of parliament as the votes showed. Outraged at not becoming the new President of the Republic, the final straw that drove Herr Draghi to the grand renunciation was the hostility of a few dozen 5 Stars parliamentarians, who walked out of the Senate without taking part in the votes. The 5 Stars were then joined by the raising of the game of the Northern League and Forza Italia (Silvio Berlusconi's party), which were demanding more space and visibility in the government but were actually preparing for a no-holds-barred internal guerrilla war.

To no avail were the seemingly sincere attempts by reappointed President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to keep Draghi in his post, or the idea of a new government of national unity, or the media campaign so well orchestrated by newspapers and other media in favor of the resigning prime minister. Mario Draghi is many things but he is not dumb, and he knows well that past August, with its vacations and the sultry, narcotizing heat, the situation in Italy could suddenly worsen because of the economic crisis, the war in Ukraine and the return of the Covid epidemic. Covid in Italy has never really gone away, which is strange given that more than 90 percent of the population is vaccinated.

To rule under these conditions, one must have the full support of an enslaved parliament (as in the Greece of Syriza and the starving) and not a recalcitrant one that disputes its absolute master and ambushes him out of the blue. Draghi preferred to retreat and perhaps watch from a safe distance a burning Italy after he himself helped start the fire.

So to the polls and may the will of the people be done! Or almost.

One thing, however, is sure: thanks to the law passed by the first government of Giuseppe "people's advocate” Conte, parliamentarians in the House will drop from 630 to 400 and senators from 315 to 200. A cut that puts a tombstone on the political careers of not a few of them.

It is very likely that the 5 Stars Movement will disappear, returning to the great nothingness from which it came. Too bad, but better that way. It had deluded many Italians, including me. We all had, we his admirers and voters, a great need for justice, honesty, glasnost and perestroika. Yes, I know: Italy has never been the Soviet Union of Brežnev and Gorbačëv, but the country's problems were serious and before everyone's eyes. They still are, indeed: now they are worse. But for those of us who had dire needs and sincere faith, the arrival of those new faces in parliament was a breath of fresh air and the beginning of the long-sought change. Those new people had promised a lot. Then it seemed they were committed to a different politics at last. At least until they made a government with the Italian Democratic Party (the former communists, who have ruled Italy since Mani Pulite onwards, whether in government or opposition). In the end, they proved to be the improvisers they had always been, and then, for us poor deluded people, it was an icy shower of equally icy reality, made by falling on the hard, rough concrete floor of our poor thing's bathroom.

Ironically, the law on cutting parliamentarians was one of the workhorses of the 5 Stars who, in retrospect, shot themselves in the foot. The very ones who said they wanted to open the Italian parliament like a can of tuna and in a few months they became the tuna trying to prevent any opening, from inside the can. They will go back to what they were before they were elected and they will lose the last hundred thousand euros in salary but whatever: the important thing is that they get out of the way. Somebody, if they can, plant them with an ash stake where ash stakes are usually planted and we turn the page. Curtain.

The Democratic Party? Well … the former Italian Communist Party has been the best ally of the Americans in Italy since … ever, that is, since Mani Pulite, almost thirty years ago. But the anthropological mutation of this party, that is, the shift from a historical Left made up of communism, families, workers, culture and the proletariat to the current cosmic nothingness of the "woke” type began well before the American-inspired judicial coup that did not even touch it. The old Christian Democracy of the First Republic was no friend of the Americans while rejecting fascism and communism. It obeyed because within the dynamics of the Cold War, but it did so obtorto collo. Its major leaders, along with Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party, never stopped seeking for Italy a path of autonomy and independence from Washington's diktats and paid their price on several occasions. One example is the assassination of Aldo Moro, still attributed solely to a commando of "communist revolutionaries” (sic) of the Red Brigades. With the Italian Democratic Party the problem does not arise, being completely smeared on the positions of its American Democratic Party counterpart, the Clintons, the neocons, the various LGBT lobbies and the "woke” culture (culture?). Let's say then that the IDP will lose some MPs and will not be able to form a government on its own, even with the help of its satellite parties that are also in danger of disappearing. It will in any case try to maintain the grip on power that he so covets, through his pro-European lobbies, the media, local governments and the large section of the judiciary that follows it blindly.

Let's be clear: those guys are really evil, but they are not from the Left!

The next government is expected to be center-right based on the alliance of Northern League, Forza Italia and Fratelli d'Italia.

I stopped following Matteo Salvini of Northern League after yet another slice of bread and chocolate, cake, pizza, hyper-condensed spaghetti dish, cholesterol cube sandwich.

What to say? I understand him a little, this Salvini. He has abandoned the role of the Northern racist who wanted to divide Italy into two new separate States. As interior minister he tried, rightly, to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants that some European countries pour into our country through their intelligence services and various NGOs on the payroll. For this he ended up being investigated by the Italian judiciary for kidnapping, crucified by the media and received not-so-subtle death threats. Even promises of "re-education” for his children after his "suicide” by hanging. He tried to be a link to Putin's Russia but relived the same treatment. He put a lot (perhaps all) of his eggs in Trump's basket but The Donald's failure to get re-elected ruined the plans. His former media manager was a brilliant professional but stumbled into a story of drugs and more. We wish Senator Salvini a better future and suggest, however, that he change his style and give himself a different bearing more befitting a statesman. If not for himself, at least for his hapless country, which certainly does not stop at the North but also includes the South of Italy.

What about Silvio Berlusconi with his "Forza Italia”? I wonder if old Silvio knows the meaning of the word "Fatherland”, but if so, he may be in good company (just look to the Left). His has always been the party of the bosses, the banks and the underpaid workers. But one must give him credit for a certain amount of pragmatism in foreign policy and the attempt to establish good relations with Russia and Libya. He failed with both, but he had Washington, the entire Italian Democratic Party and a clockwork judiciary against him. It was Mario Draghi governor of the ECB who wrote him a letter in 2011 instructing him to resign as prime minister so he could abandon Qaddafi to his fate under NATO bombs. Berlusconi had already resisted for a week but the artificial rise in the spread of our government bonds finally forced him to surrender.

Thus, we lost Gaddafi's Libya, a difficult neighbor but one who had us in sympathy, and we sank into shame once more. As we know, revenge is a dish best served cold, and after eleven years it must have been cold enough: it was Berlusconi who gave Draghi the cold shoulder. Silvio Berlusconi has so far survived everything his opponents have thrown at him and also his considerable sexual appetite. He will have his share of ministers in the new government, hopefully not all of them discards.

Giorgia Meloni and her "Fratelli d'Italia” could have been the ones to get us back on the right track, but "Io sono Giorgia” [1] at one point became associated with the Aspen Intitute. Rumor has it that she will be the next Prime Minister, the first woman to be President of the Council of the Italian Republic, at a time when it seems there are no men capable of doing a man's job anymore. She will have to face the challenges from which Draghi escaped without having, perhaps, the secret agenda. Again, I recall some of them.

The continuing landings of illegal immigrants, but she no longer says that those of the NGOs are privateer ships that need to be sunk. The likely winter strikes, but she can always count on the democratic batons of the Italian police. The likely energy shortages and skyrocketing prices, but she herself helped the previous government on more than one occasion. Relations with Russia now at rock bottom, but she says she is "Atlanticist”.

Finally, let's not forget that Covid loves our country so much that it seems convinced to stay there for a long time, but Giorgia does not say that it is the fault of the maddening vaccination against a flu-like and very changeable airborne virus.

So, with such heroes, what can possibly go wrong?

[1] “I am Giorgia” - From the title of his recent political autobiography.