We were used, due to professional duty and institutional role, to follow Giorgia’s footsteps. The summer of 2024 instead recommended us to keep an eye on Arianna’s thread. Just think that only a week ago, Italy’s most famous sister seemed to be the victim of a media and judicial conspiracy, which at the moment seems to have been foiled by the prompt and preventive denunciation of the director of the Giornale Sandro Sallusti. A week later, there is still no trace of the investigation for influence peddling against Meloni Arianna – but maybe it will emerge in a little while, who knows – and yet the same sister of the Prime Minister is on the front page with great constancy and regularity, for completely different issues. On Friday, an investigation by the newspaper Il Domani revealed that the Fondazione Alleanza Nazionale, of which Arianna Meloni is a board member, financed a neo-fascist association to purchase the walls in which the historic MSI club of Acca Larenzia is located, a tragic symbol of neo-fascist militancy that recalls the identity of the Years of Lead. She does not have a decisive role, Arianna and her friends say, in the decision: but in the meantime she sits on that Board of Directors, and it is that Board of Directors that supervises the decisions of an organization.

Arianna Meloni: on holiday with her ex

Who knows if it’s a coincidence, but the day after Friday, that is Saturday, Arianna Meloni is still on the front pages, this time that of Il Foglio. There is also talk of politics, of the desire to create a school of right-wing politics: but anyway, the news of the day is definitely another one, the one that says she and Lollo(brigida), Francesco, Minister of Agriculture in her sister’s government, have broken up, even if they still share the house. Imagine what a beautiful atmosphere there must have been, in the farmhouse, until a few days ago, when the two sisters of Italy were there, on “vacation”, together with their two cumbersome exes. Certainly, in two cases out of two, private life is both a toil that becomes public, and a public discourse that hides others, all political, certainly more relevant to the lives of all of us.

Autonomy and ius scholae

Indeed, there would be no shortage of reasons for reflection on the political moment we are living in, and which we are going through precisely on the shoulders of this twice Melonian government. The week that is ending, speaking of politics and still of family, but in another sense, has continued to make the debate revolve around two important words, different, only apparently distant from each other: citizenship and differentiated autonomy. The Ius Scholae, Soli, Sanguinis, on the one hand, to talk about a reform of the citizenship criteria; and that, already approved and “threatened” by a popular referendum, of the relationship between the central state and regional autonomy, the so-called “differentiated autonomy”.

They seem to be – and in many ways they really are – different and very distant issues. Yet, if you think about it, they both concern the reasons why a country is a country, a nation defines itself as such. They question the roots of our being together as an institutionalized community, which is called to vote, to pay taxes, to attend compulsory schooling, to consider itself, in short, a place of citizens. These are very serious questions and debates, which are at the foundations of the edifice of democratic politics, and which in our country, even in recent days and certainly in those to come, have instead been treated as clubs available to small propaganda: first of all those internal to a right that is together to govern, but then has great difficulty in being together, governing.

Let’s start with differentiated autonomy. The Lega’s workhorse, wanted by Salvini to mend fences with the history and the Northern leadership of a party that had led to the South, to extreme nationalism and to the right in the first part of his secretariat, is the ripe fruit of a journey that began twenty-five years ago, and at the hands of the center-left. The center-left of Prodi, D’Alema, Bassanini who, fearing the competition of Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord, reformed the institutional and constitutional order in such a way as to allow – forgive the simplification – that even the regions with ordinary statutes could enjoy the prerogatives and autonomy enjoyed by those with special statutes. Those reforms, dating back to the legislature that began in 1996 and ended in 2001, in which three center-left governments alternated, made the reform signed by Roberto Calderoli in this legislature possible and legitimate. In short, it is an opening of the center-left to the demands of the Northern League that makes possible, today, a reform that the center-left is unitedly opposed to, albeit with different nuances, while the governing right supports with alternating convictions. In particular, several center-right governors of the South, although pressured and vaguely threatened by their coalition partners, support in every venue the referendum to repeal the Calderoli law. And within the government the sensibilities are different, as is inevitable when the interests represented, even territorially, are very different from each other. Because it is quite obvious that Luca Zaia and Giorgia Meloni have different histories, represent different worlds and territories, and the primary interests of those who vote for one or the other are secularly conflicting.

The surreal debate on citizenship

And what about the surreal debate on the criteria for acquiring Italian citizenship? A country that has over 10% of regular immigrants, with places like Milan where foreigners make up as much as 20%, hundreds of thousands of children and young people filling schools that would otherwise be a mirror of the demographic desert generated by us natives, a country that without the work of migrants simply would not have enough workers, at least in certain areas of its territory. Well, that country, ours, should really discuss seriously how one becomes a citizen, rights and duties included. It certainly does not mean being in favor of the Ius Scholae, a proposal that makes sense, and supported among others by the quiet thorn in the side that Tajani is becoming. To begin with, we could even be satisfied with the fact that, as Luca Zaia asks, upon reaching the age of 18, and perhaps not only for those born here but also for those who have attended school here for 10 years, there really is an automatic assignment of citizenship, instead of subjecting these very Italian kids to the first very Italian and multi-year bureaucratic process of their lives. For a country that seems to live in the mid-twentieth century, when the only migrants were Italians from the south or the north-east who went to the cities, and the others left, it would already be a step forward, however insufficient.

Fear of losing votes

But no, we can’t even talk about this. Because – explains Salvini – all this is not in the government program “voted by Italians”. The truth, if only he and Meloni wanted to say it, is that they are afraid of losing the votes of those on the far right without even knowing it. The votes of those who live with their heads in a past that no longer exists. If that past had ever been so beautiful, it will never return. The time of Paesi Tuoi which, for those who remember a great novel by Cesare Pavese that bore this title, was not so beautiful. The time of communities that were all together from the cradle to the grave, and sometimes the first was more uncomfortable than the second. The time in which you could recognize Italians by their physical features, to quote a General who unfortunately discovered he had a passion for politics. It is that Italy that tells us that there is a dictatorship of minorities, referring to gays, and above all to immigrants and those who help them. It would be good to remind them all that a general followed in every real and virtual square by troops of pensioners and younger layabouts with little literacy is not yet a majority. It would be good if Giorgia Meloni also remembered this. She lives in terror at the idea of ​​having enemies on the right. And yet, as everyone knows, to grow up you have to kill your fathers at a certain point. And your grandfathers too.

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