Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
AND also this time the first woman president of the Republic and the first woman president of the Council will be for the next time.
Artists, writers, intellectuals had made an appeal for a female head of state. Many people, including other artists, other writers, other intellectuals have replied that you do not need a woman as such, but a competent and honest person, regardless of gender.
I understand them; but they are right up to a point. There will come a day when a female boss or head of state will not make the news; but that day is not today.
Of course you don’t need just any woman. She would not serve the country and would not serve the cause of women. But a woman at the Quirinale or Palazzo Chigi – obviously chosen from among the many competent and honest women available to the country – would represent an impulse of innovation, openness, modernity that, I’m sure, would be appreciated by Italians.
Of course, as Graziano Delrio pointed out, a president of the Republic “does not invent himself in vitro”. And some perplexity about the head of the secret services who becomes head of state is legitimate.
This does not mean that the names circulated in recent days were of excellent quality. I don’t know Marta Cartabia; but both Elisabetta Belloni and Paola Severino would have been great presidents of the Republic, esteemed and loved by the citizens.
Yet the rise of women has only just begun. At the ballot of the next French presidential elections – set for April 24 – Emmanuel Macron will definitely face a woman: either the usual Marine Le Pen, or the real novelty of this vote, Valérie Pécresse.
Marine would certainly be defeated, albeit not quite as sharply as five years ago; but Pécresse can play it. President of Ile-deFrance, the Paris Region, and exponent of the republican rightthe traditional Gaullist one, not the anti-European and anti-system one, Valérie may be the first woman to become president of the Republic.
And France would once again have anticipated Italy. While on the other side of the Channel, a head of state turns seventy years in power: Queen Elizabeth II.
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