Until August 28, the Instagram profile of the almost unknown Maria Rosaria Boccia was followed by just over 27 thousand people. Not a few, but certainly not enough to define the now declared ex-lover of the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, as an influencer. At this moment that same profile has surpassed 100 thousand fans and continues to climb.

A government made a laughing stock

If the crafty Pompeian businesswoman was looking for visibility, it is quite obvious that she succeeded in a big way. A visibility obtained by making a laughing stock of a member of the Meloni government and the prime minister herself, who in order to defend her most loyal supporter exposed herself personally and had her most loyal supporters and her “servitude” to the state exposed: the use of Tg1 directed by Gian Marco Chiocci as a grotesque confessional to allow Sangiuliano to apologize to his wife and the prime minister after having confessed his extramarital affair with Boccia and after having repeated that the lover had always been hosted at his expense and not at the expense of the Italians is incredible. A version in fact denied by a subsequent interview of the interested party.

Boccia’s travels and the mystery of Sangiuliano’s “receipts”: embezzlement hypothesis, the case in the prosecutor’s office

The competent bodies will verify whether what the minister said is true, and will now investigate after the complaint filed by MP Angelo Bonelli, but the political problem remains and is enormous. In what capacity did Maria Rosaria Boccia take part in more or less confidential events? In what capacity did she communicate with the staff of the Ministry of Culture who also organized her trips? Regardless of who paid for her (who candidly said she never took a single euro out of her own pocket…), why did a minister of the Republic use his role to take a woman he was having an affair with around public events?

The public and the private

If you think badly, you could say that Sangiuliano used his role to show off, as a means to win over the entrepreneur. Some parliamentary reporters will remember a funny anecdote from the last legislature, when a deputy – later to become undersecretary – who was looking for her “prince charming” signed up to a well-known dating app and among the private photos she used to introduce herself to aspiring suitors, she uploaded one in which she spoke in the Montecitorio chamber during a session. Another demonstration, certainly less serious than the current one, of how those who do not know how to divide their public role and their private life can ridicule the institutions they represent.

Why Sangiuliano should resign

Sangiuliano should resign and leave all public office. He should do so not because what he did was “immoral” nor because he was the last in order of time to betray the cloying narrative on the so-called “traditional family”, the one that a government full of cohabitants, divorcees, parents of children born out of wedlock, threesomes and foursomes, would like to impose on all Italians: he should do so because he has damaged the institution he represents, not only in terms of image; an institution on which he has imposed a figure linked to the “weakness” of his personal flesh. He should do so to also free himself from the blackmail he is suffering due to his inability to manage the public figure he embodies: at the moment we do not know whether Boccia, with his cell phone or with his glasses with a built-in video camera, recorded compromising or potentially damaging conversations for the Republic, but the mere suspicion that this has happened should push the minister to resign.

A structural problem of the government

As for Giorgia Meloni, the affair confirms something that was already evident, something that had already manifested itself with the gaffes of Sangiuliano himself, with those of the Prime Minister’s colleague and brother-in-law, Francesco Lollobrigida, with the investigations involving the Minister of Tourism, Daniela Santanchè, with the “gunslinger” deputy, with the deputy convicted for having paid for dinners, clothes and an erotic book with public money and with a long list of pleasantries: the leadership group that the right has “deployed” in what is in all respects its “appointment with history”, is a leadership group of the lowest quality. A poor and unreliable leadership group, which risks making Italy less and less credible in Europe and in the world. The next appointment is September 19, when a minister who tearfully confessed to an extramarital affair with a woman who recorded their private conversations and aspired to obtain a public office, will have to preside over the G7 of Culture.