Time.news – Ten little Indians at the Quirinale. Without heinous murders, without brutal murders or sins to atone, the long run for the presidency of the Republic begins to see some of the possible candidates leave the scene. Sergio Mattarella got out first, in the New Year’s speech, recalling that 2021 would be his last year at the Colle. Candidate by some politicians and many newspapers for an encore on the model of Giorgio Napolitano, the current Head of State has made it known, citing his predecessor Antonio Segni a few weeks later, that he believes the seven-year duration for the presidential function. And with a ‘seven and no more seven’ he closed the door to the complicated theory of who would see him re-elected to favor Mario Draghi’s arrival at the Presidency of the Republic once the office of Prime Minister has ended with the end of the legislature .
But the audience of candidates, or at least of those that commentators indicate as such, is long, perhaps more than the ten protagonists of the crime of Agatha Christie, while the plot that usually leads to the election of the President of the Republic has nothing to envy to the ‘sharp and geometric intellect of the British writer. The many ‘fallen’ on the road that from the Chamber, where the election takes place, leads to one of the seven most evocative and historically rich hills of the capital know something about it. Giulio Andreotti, Arnaldo Forlani, Amintore Fanfani, Giovanni Spadolini, to go to distant years, Franco Marini, Stefano Rodotà and Romano Prodi to name the most recent.
And it is Prodi himself who plays the part of the second ‘little Indian’, escaping the race to the Quirinale with an interview. “Beyond the obstacle of age, it’s not my job” explains in a few words the former prime minister and and leader of the Ulivo. “It would have been forced the other time too, when I had the Parliament vote against. The mediation role to which the President of the Republic is obliged is not mine. I’m certainly not a fanatic, but I’m not super partes: I have ideas very precise. I’ve always been a biased man, always open and understanding, but I still am “.
And drawing from the bunch of those who, at times without any subjective aspiration, have been inserted into the ranks of candidates, others are the names that have objectively lost the thrust they seemed to have until a few months ago. Among them Giuseppe Conte: hypothesized by some about his race when he was at Palazzo Chigi, now his profile as leader in pectore of a party clashes with the silhouette of those who are usually chosen for the Quirinale. Which is made up of experience but also absence from recent scenes, a guarantee but not a commitment to active politics. For the same reason Enrico Letta, now elected leader of the Democratic Party, clearly has other perspectives ahead of him. Same thing goes for Silvio Berlusconi, leader of Forza Italia. The three leaders will, however, along with others, have the role of king makers. However, the race has just begun, albeit perhaps a little too early, and some of the controversies of recent weeks that have invested other eligible candidates could already be forgotten when in January 2022 the great electors will have to choose Mattarella’s successor in the secret of the ballot box. Many will then be the names that will receive sudden notoriety and will be widely and publicly praised with the confessed hope that they will be ‘burned’. Among those already mentioned, in the newspapers rather than in the small groups of the Transatlantic, Marta Cartabia, Pierferdinando Casini, Elisabetta Casellati, Dario Franceschini, Paolo Gentiloni, David Sassoli, Walter Veltroni, Francesco Rutelli, Renato Pera, Emma Bonino, Paola Severino, Letizia Moratti. An incomplete list, to which someone continues to add Mattarella’s bid, and which could increase.
Certainly there is that it will not be easy to find an alchemy that leads to a shared name, without shaking the government majority, avoiding moving too many pawns in the institutional roles covered in Italy and abroad by those that are usually defined ‘reserves of the Republic’. But there are still seven months left, and many ‘Indians’ will be in and out of the ranks before the next president takes office for another seven years.
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