Surprise: there is a policy that rebels against the dictatorship of the moral question

There's an interesting, even surprising, element regarding a subtle thread connecting three important investigations currently shaking up Italian politics. The three investigations are those in Milan, Marche, and Calabria, and while they may seem like distant stories, there's a curious, even positive, element in them, concerning an increasingly rare issue within political parties: the attempt by politicians to defend their vital perimeter. Politics doesn't always pay attention to this issue, politics doesn't always do anything to prevent the judiciary, for example, from dictating politicians' actions, moves, and choices. And when this happens, even though some choices are driven more by the agenda of instrumentality than sincerity, it's worth pausing for a moment and saying: good. The three stories are different, we know, but in recent days, among many political forces, there has been a surge of due process that deserves to be noted.

In Milan, amid much embarrassment, much contortion, much silence, the Democratic Party, despite its natural propensity to follow the Grillino-Conti agenda—that is, to consider all investigated politicians guilty until proven innocent, unless otherwise determined by Conte's People's Tribunal—has made a courageous choice and decided not to withhold its support for a mayor under investigation, like Beppe Sala, and a battered municipal government, like Milan's. The choice is doubly important because the Democratic Party, modeled after Schlein, has always considered the Milanese model the furthest thing on the left from the Democratic Party's vision of the future, and the distance from the productive world that Milan embodies in recent years has taken on significant levels of reciprocity: Schlein has never loved Milan, Milan has never loved Schlein. Absolute reciprocity, as Trump would say.

Yet, despite some political somersaults, Schlein decided not to pander to the siren calls of the Five Star Movement in Milan and gave Sala his support. He did so by asking, in a paradoxical way, to move forward, renouncing the mayor's extensive program of the Milan model in recent years. But he did so, and that's what matters, despite the Five Star Movement's demands for Sala: resign, resign, resign. The same choice, essentially, was made without much hesitation in the Marche region. Here too, a center-left figure, Matteo Ricci, is under investigation, and here too, a choice that, for Schlein, was courageous: not asking his own candidate for the Marche region to resign in advance due to a notice of investigation, but instead trying to convince Giuseppe Conte of the merits of Ricci's candidacy despite the notice of investigation. The charade mounted around Ricci's candidacy was humiliating, we know, and Giuseppe Conte's transformation from people's advocate to tribune of the people—Conte's "Give me the papers" recalls Giucas Casella's "Give me your eyes"—was a scene halfway between Italian comedy and political tragedy. But despite this, in the end, the result was twofold, and it's a result that carries weight: not only is the Democratic Party running a politician under investigation in the Marche region, whom it therefore considers innocent until proven guilty, but it's also supported by champions of the Five Star Movement's ruling class, now Conte's, who in recent days, on summer talk shows, have chosen to employ a narrative halfway between hilariousness and comedy, in keeping with the Five Star Movement's tradition: we always advocate for due process; what we do is simply evaluate political expediency, case by case.

A very superficial observer might notice that the M5S's guaranteeism is casually invoked only when the suspect is a politician favored by the M5S. Matteo Ricci, close to Goffredo Bettini and Giuseppe Conte, certainly falls into this political category, as did two former Five Star Movement mayors investigated and defended by the M5S more for Grillism than for guaranteeism. But in any case, Ricci's support from the M5S—support that Giuseppe Conte, completely embarrassed when explaining the reasons for guaranteeism, chose to assert last Thursday by reading a written text, as if he were held hostage by the alien supporters of guarantees—has produced quite a spectacle. We don't know how long it will last, but, while it lasts, we could summarize it this way: politics demanding that its own political time is not dictated by the judiciary.

Another very inattentive and malicious observer might think that the broad camp's guaranteeism would have been more cunning if the politicians under investigation (Sala and Ricci) had been center-right, but we are certain that Schlein and Conte's guaranteeism is sincere and they would have treated the mayor of Milan the same way if he had been a protégé of Ignazio La Russa or the candidate in the Marche region if he had been an old friend of Arianna Meloni. Among the images to be added to the small picture described, of politics trying, step by step and with small tricks, to reclaim its space, without allowing the judiciary to have a more disruptive effect on the parties than the leadership does, there is also that of Roberto Occhiuto, governor of Calabria, accused of corruption for an affair unrelated to his experience leading the region, and who chose to go to the polls a year before the natural expiration of his mandate to prevent that investigation from paralyzing his government, to prevent regional leaders from being terrified of signing documents for a president who is about to expire and is under investigation. And in its own way, this choice fits perfectly into the framework from which we began: the judiciary does its job, politics does its own, and politics that becomes subservient to the judiciary is simply politics that isn't doing its job well. One could say that this should simply be the norm, obviously. But in an Italy where the Constitution is praised while systematically forgetting to also praise Article 27, according to which every suspect is innocent until proven guilty, the extraordinary makes news, and seeing a political system timidly rebelling against the dictatorship of the moral question can only raise a smile, while awaiting the next pirouette of the Giucascaconte d'Italia.

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