The ten years of President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale

Ten years ago, on January 31, 2015, Sergio Mattarella was first elected President of the Republic. He would have replied, with greater consensus and with greater star, seven years later. There are no longer easy times, even if his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano had appreciated the reconfirmation.

Because it takes someone to the hill who unites and does not divide, holds together and does not split the delicate balances on which a democracy stands. The Constitution itself says it by attributing to the Head of State, before anything else, the task of representing national unity. Mastiere not easy at every time and in every place, let alone when democracies begin to take – the problem crosses them all – the aspect of condominium assemblies, or of plywood gathering of tribal representatives if not, to put it more aulically with sieces, Squares in which men who say they are free deceive each other by force of forgiveness. But Sorse was wrong and Herodotus gained: the democratic systems are more resistant even than the Moplen than once.

Isotactic polypropylene keeps the blow more than the steel of every autocracy, and this is because it is based on a formula, a set of formulas, a system of formulas that allow the subject to transform and always remain that. These are the rules, the rules.

And of the rules Sergio Mattarella, in these two decades, has been guarantor. He said it precisely ten years ago, just sworn as president: I am the referee, the players have a duty to follow them and, so, to help me in my job. Not a interventionist quirinal, his, but urger to the good game. So it was that the Republic has gone from its second phase to the third without shocks.

It was not easy: at the time of the election the political model that emerged after Tangentopoli was consuming and it was a matter of preventing the new in progress from blowing the fundamentals. Convinced as it was that the change should not be hindered, but accompanied and maintained in the riverbed of constitutionality, Mattarella has kept the system in balance despite having in front of formations born declaredly to open the parliament as a box of tuna, or marked at the great family of the sovereign Eurosceptics.

In short, the Constitution as a toolbox to make the country’s engine go: adjusting the minimum, perhaps raising it a little, and slowing down to the hardest curves. The mutation, in these ten years, has been radical. To put it with the rankings of the first few times, the maximum expression of language in a social era, it had never happened before in the buttons room to direct a woman and that there was an openly lined up coalition more right than on the right than to the center.

The transformation took place in full compliance with the rules, in a climate where the legitimate political debate has never degenerated. The metamorphosis of those political forces born declaredly, or declaredly deployed, was equally profound against the process of European integration. In one case as in the other the Quirinale, rather than intervening, accompanied the process respectfully. By making reflecting, bringing developments to mature that it was possible to the maximum to glimpse in a nuce.

Not that it has not sometimes resorted to a clear language. If anything, you are reserved for a few rare occasions in which the interlocutor showed hardness of the ear, or an excessive dose of excess. But in the latter cases little is filtered outside the centuries -old walls that arise on the hill. Among all one we remember: it was educated, whispered but public. Which raises us from interpretative responsibilities.

It was when the then British premier Boris Johnson, the greatest architect of the Brexit among the Tory of his country, began to mottle alluding – were the times of the hardest Covid – on the Italian pusillanimity that led us to give up freedom for the plate of lentils of health.

“We are free and we like the seriousness” he replied the first Italian, and allusion does not need explanatory notes. Curated, Britannia. Because Mattarella is like this: whoever highlights the silence is wrong. Is that it needs little to speak. He often speaks with his eyes. Pudically hidden under a pair of vaguely demodè glasses, Sergio Mattarella’s eyes are – as for everyone, but never as in his case – the mirror of the soul. Who can, try to observe them: clear and sharp, where one would wait for them Franciscanly submissive.

Since he is Sicilian, inevitable to think of Norman blood but, since he is Sicilian, inevitable to grasp in the expression a note all aimed at the Mediterranean and his finesses. In short, a true Swabian of the Federician court. However, he adapts to him an expression used for his predecessors, that of King of the Republic. It is not a question of vaguely deprecative minimalism: it is that the monarchical method at all suits him, preferring first for other forms of management and interpretation of the role. After all, it is also for this reason that his approval indexes are permanently on the above: more than sanctioning, he resumes; More than imposing, convinces. It is impossible to argue with those who address the word by speaking decibel and decibel under the tolerability limit.

The best revenge against Urlo’s policy. And if he is put in the rain, as in Paris for the Olympics, he shakes the water from the shoulder and pretends to be nothing. But then his satisfactions are doing, and it has been seen in Paris. Or even in London, in the European final.

Because man is also a discreet fan of sport, another thing that brings him closer to the general public. To the way reserved so, it is annoyed to be approached to the Guinness Book of Records, so we will not remind him that he has established one: nobody, from the dawn of the Republic, managed to remain so long to the Quirinale. Ten round rounds. To find those who have resided more you have to go to the papal registers or the annals of the Savoy. But these are other rankings, other groups. Who belong, if anything, to the sieces.