Fini’s parables
Merits, ambitions and faults of Gianfranco Fini. Damato's italics
Giorgia Meloni – or Giorgia, as she prefers to be called and voted for in the European elections in June – has a year and a half of leading the government behind her and another three and a half ahead of her, before the 2027 elections for the ordinary renewal of Parliament. Gianfranco Fini, already her mentor and leader, who first took her to the vice-presidency of the Chamber and then to the government as minister of Silvio Berlusconi, hopes between appeal, perhaps also Court of Cassation and prescription, to spare himself the two years and eight months in prison received yesterday in Rome, after seven years of trial, for the Monte Carlo affair. Where he authorized – as the sentence contested – the cheap sale of a house received by his party as an inheritance from a generous and noble elector and which became the object of an adventurous, to say the least, speculation.
Even before the provisional conviction of a court of the Republic, which gives him the right, for goodness' sake, to enjoy the so-called presumption of innocence, Fini suffered the end of his political career due to that unfortunate event. This materialized, in particular, in his failure to re-elect himself to Parliament, despite being the outgoing President of the Chamber, on the lifeboat offered to him in 2013 by the then Prime Minister Mario Monti.
Between the two facts, situations, circumstances of incontrovertible reality mentioned at the beginning there is the whole parable, paradoxically in reverse, of the Italian right cleared by Berlusconi more than thirty years ago by inserting it into the coalition successfully improvised to avoid the victory of the " joyful war machine” – remember? – set up by Achille Occhetto: the last secretary of the PCI overwhelmed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism and the first of the PDS marked by an oak tree. At whose feet the hammer and sickle of the previous political formation had been placed. Or “company”, as perhaps Pier Luigi Bersani already then.
There is a certain, due and even deserved sadness for Fini when observing his conditions and comparing them to those of his former party colleague Meloni. A sadness aggravated, not alleviated, by the carelessly lowered guard by him, who also seemed so attentive, in a political activity also carried out with courage, to the point of making the right leave the old "father's house", as he called it, and from recognize "absolute evil" in the fascism from which the older, or less young, of the then National Alliance, formerly the Social Movement, came. What betrayed him not only and not so much was the historicist ease reproached for him in his area of origin, or his intolerance for Berlusconi's leadership, which he wanted to overcome or dismiss prematurely, but rather his heart. That is, simply love for a woman and participation in her family, where that mess in Monte Carlo developed.
Devil of a man, evidently made not shrewd enough by politics, which is also a school of shrewdness, as demonstrated by the new leader of the right.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/fini-sentenza-processo/ on Wed, 01 May 2024 06:18:59 +0000.