how the role of the head of state has changed – time.news

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from FERRUCCIO DE BORTOLI

Marzio Breda’s essay on the last five presidents of the Republic and on the institutional transformations that have seen them acquire a new profile is released on 7 January for Marsilio

it also happened that it was feared to answer a phone call from President of the Republic. Not out of shyness but out of fear of his words and the inevitable consequences. It happened with Francesco Cossiga, first taciturn and introverted Sardinian and then unleashed pickaxe of the Republic. Not that we wanted to censor him (someone thought about it and partly did), but because of the unease and embarrassment (Is he okay?) Aroused by his repeated utterances. As Marzio Breda recalls in his essay Heads without a state (published by Marsilio), a journalist’s task is to correctly report, describe the context, the background, the reasons. Without any country charity. Otherwise – writes Breda – I would have had to give someone a role as political commissioner. And inevitably everything he wrote would appear to be false or artifact. However, not trusting the pack of reporters who followed him, then head of state instructed a typist of the Quirinale, Dino Pr, to record and transcribe his continuous utterances. And not content, he sent articles, even three in one day, to newspapers under the pseudonyms of Franco Mauri and Mauro Franchi.


One can even have a friendly and fraternal relationship with a head of state – and Breda had it not only with Cossiga – but the chronicler, if such and therefore useful to public opinion, simply does his job. He doesn’t look anyone in the face. The character ambivalence of Cossiga (There is a little black man, my hypercritical half, and the little white man who amuses and seduces) all in this episode. The president invites Breda to his house for a coffee. And suddenly he struts in the mirror wearing one after another two masks, one black and one white, which he kept on the shelves of the library. What did you think, dear Bredda? The two men really exist. Reaction: a silent smile of circumstance. But Cossiga – the author notes – with his shamanic vision had warned that theItaly it could end badly. He sensed the degeneration of the institutional crisis, the decline of the parties, the populist thrusts. But he said it wrong. And this was his main fault. Even though he boasted that he had elevated the insult to an art form. Cossiga’s predecessor was Sandro Pertini. He too is great, and not always appropriate, an outsourcer. With the partisan president you change the material constitution of the country. Previously, the president was believed to have to speak only in certain official circumstances, also considering articles 74 and 87 of the Constitution. In his day, Giuseppe Saragat congratulated Nino Benvenuti for becoming world boxing champion. And Carlo Galante Garrone harshly reprimanded him in the Senate. That telegram from the first magistrate of Italy was inappropriate. Things from the last century. Another world.


Because the title Heads without a state? To point out their, albeit different, loneliness compared to other powers: the government, parliament, the judiciary. But also to underline the constitutional elusiveness of the role, one of the main interpretative keys of Breda’s book. Each president has modeled it, in the wake of the limits set by the Constitution, on the basis of one’s own personality and the complexity created by the continuous voids of politics and economic emergencies. Each head of state has faced in his own way the recurring crises of the infinite and unresolved Italian transition. One different from the other. And the figure of the President of the Republic has undergone a sort of evolutionary metamorphosis. Now irreversible.

it also happened that the head of the press office of the Quirinale asked for the head of the Corriere quirinalist. Without getting it of course. Breda had followed the turbulent years of the pickaxe, how could this also be the signing of a seven-year change? Oscar Luigi Scalfaro he should have done (according to the green Mauro Paissan) the exact opposite of Cossiga. A slightly retro Catholic – whom many immediately dismissed as a baciapile – but who instead was strictly secular. At De Gasperi. Scalfaro was elected in emotion and bewilderment for the attack on Capaci. In a terrible year, 1992, in which the party system was crumbling under the blows of judicial inquiries. He was a governing president. Not the only one. That is, a ruler of the state in moments of crisis in the system, in the words of the constitutionalist Carlo Esposito. Estern too, and how. That is not against the excesses of the tinkling of handcuffs, in a season of poisons in which the risk of a coup was far from remote. Years later, the chronicler Breda asked the senator for life, visiting him at his home in Novara, why he had not specified the circumstances to better reject those insinuations. Should I lower myself to their level of indecency ?, replied Scalfaro referring to deviated sectors of the Services found with their hands in the bag and which had circulated totally invented accusations. Scalfaro was a surprise. Indigestible especially for the arrembante Silvio Berlusconi (from which he deleted, in his first government, the name of Cesare Previti destined for Justice). The center-right felt deceived by a broken promise of early elections. Uncomfortable even for the Vatican. After all, he was the one who gave the first job to a former Communist, Massimo D’Alema (the aforementioned Cossiga hopes).

Also Carlo Azeglio Ciampi he would have liked to say little. It was not in his character. But eventually it will do even more than its predecessors. Above all to rediscover a lost sense of the homeland, to build a collective consciousness by closing the still open wounds. Breda calls him a national peacemaker. In cultivating the memory of the Resistance, on which the Constitution is based, one must have the courage to forgive (its criticized reference to the boys of Sal). Not to understand, let alone to absolve. Ciampi’s was a patriotic pedagogy. Like Scalfaro, he was defined by the center-right as an opposition president. He clashed hard with the Knight in his years of maximum consent. Limit many of the laws ad personam, but not as he would have liked. Now weakened by the disease, conversing with the author, he said that when Scalfaro called him to ask him if he would accept to be the Minister of Economy in the first Prodi government, he already knew he had an incurable disease. But he said yes out of discipline and a spirit of service.

Unlike Ciampi and Cossiga, Napolitano he was elected with a modest absolute majority. First ex-communist head of state, he immediately proposed – says Breda – to arrive at mutual recognition between sides and the affirmation of a mature democracy of alternation. He too came to terms with history. And with his personal history, recognizing the errors of the Communist Party, deaf in 1956 to the just Hungarian battle for freedom. And admitting the amnesia of the left on sinkhole. Napolitano had to face the profound financial crisis of 2011, on which there is still a distorted memory today. There was no coup. Berlusconi took a step back after losing the majority. The choice of Monti, appointed a few days before a life senator, saved Italy from bankruptcy.

Napolitano accepted re-election before a paralyzed Parliament after the 2013 vote. Confider to our reporter: Everything was exceptional in those moments that required a different formula to be dealt with in a bipolar system. Breda hypothesizes a subsequent repentance of the president on re-election and on the reforms imposed from above, effectively overlapping the prerogatives of the Chambers.

The hypothesis of a re-election, despite the many appeals, was strongly rejected by Sergio Mattarella. A president attentive to the role of arbiter assigned to him by the Constitution, inclined by character and formation to a quieter institutional normality but forced to face the emergence of two opposing populisms, however, at least initially contrary to the Western and European position of the country. And today the government is Mario Draghi, the best of guarantees. As soon as Mattarella was elected, there were those who said to Breda: From today you quirinalists are destined to become extinct, throw yourself into something else or you will end up unemployed. On the sidelines of the first interview granted to the Corriere, it happened instead that it was Mattarella who questioned Breda, now a historical memory of the Quirinale. He answered a little embarrassed. Unfortunately, the reversed interview is not there. We would all have read it with great curiosity. More for the questions – the author will not take any – than for the answers.

The book presentations

There are two meetings during which Marzio Breda will present his book Heads without a state (Marsilio), in which he recounts the last five presidents of the Republic and reflects on the institutional transformations that have seen them acquire a new profile. The first appointment will be held in Rome, at the Feltrinelli bookshop of the Alberto Sordi Gallery: on Tuesday 11 January, at 6 pm, Breda will meet with the constitutionalist Michele Ainis, the Minister of Economic Development Giancarlo Giorgetti and the secretary of the Pd Enrico Letta; the director of Tg1 Monica Maggioni will introduce and moderate the debate. In Verona, Thursday 20 January at 6 pm, at the Feltrinelli bookshop, Breda will talk with the editor of Corriere del Veneto Alessandro Russello.

January 4, 2022 (change January 4, 2022 | 21:33)

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