It’s his last year-end message, his mandate is about to expire on February 3, and somehow his greeting to the Italians is also in the finale. “If I look at the journey we have made together in these seven years, I have confidence. Italy will grow ». Sergio Mattarella cannot help but tell about his seven years starting from the pandemic, from the memory of the isolation and the victims but also of the time of reaction.
“What would we have given for vaccines in those days?” he wonders when he talks about an Italy at the beginning of the wave, lost and closed, and of one that later was able to trust science and rediscover a piece of normality and sociability. “And yet we got up,” he says when he thanks the “responsible” behavior of the Italians and all the institutions. “Even in the darkest moments, I’ve never felt alone.”
His “gratitude” goes to those who were on the front line: to the mayors, presidents of the Region, to those who worked in the area. And then he will also thank Parliament and governments. To the Pope
The profile of a head of state: patriotism is guaranteeing unity and cohesion
From the thanks he goes to the heart of his speech, the one in which he leaves his personal testimony and legacy of what for him it was to embody the function of head of state. Basically that of representing “the real face of a united and united Republic”. Or as he says later: “It is patriotism concretely expressed in the life of the Republic”. It seems a bit like an answer to Giorgia Meloni who said she wanted a patriot president and he goes to define its substance, its meaning. “The Constitution entrusts the Head of State with the task of representing national unity.” Therefore, patriotism is above all the ability to create cohesion, unity and not divisions. A passage that he declines very well when he explains that the “bond between institutions and society must be strengthened every time” beyond the divisions that exist and must not be denied, but in times of difficulty, “the attitude of our people to preserve the cohesion”. It is this attitude that must guarantee a head of state who is such if he pursues two basic requirements: «to strip himself of all previous belonging and take on the sole responsibility of the general interest. And then to safeguard the role, powers and prerogatives of the institution that it must transmit intact to its successor ».
The balance of the seven-year period between “governability” and the risks of “leaps in the dark”
Here, in defining the profile of a head of state he does not dare to give report cards to himself. “It is not for me to say whether and to what extent he has succeeded in fulfilling this duty. What I want to tell you is that I have done my best, in every circumstance, to carry out my task in strict compliance with the constitution ”. And one passage, in particular, is the most political of his end-of-year speech. When he says that “the governability that the institutions have helped to achieve has allowed the country, especially in some particularly difficult and demanding phases, to avoid dangerous leaps in the dark”. The reference is to those moments in which he intervened to give a direction or a turning point to the legislature. Starting from when he formed the Gentiloni government after the referendum defeat and Renzi’s resignation, then to the pressures after the 2018 vote to try not to interrupt the legislature that has just begun – coming to convene Cottarelli – until the birth and fall of Count I and del Conte II and then – almost a year ago – the new government crisis and the assignment entrusted to Draghi to face the pandemic and implement the European Plan.