For the first time in seven years of presidency, 80-year-old Sergio Mattarella recently showed a glimpse of his emotions, because no, he no longer wants to stay on as president of Italy. His time at the center of power is over, please choose a new leader.
The Italian president yearns for an existence outside of politics. He has actually been doing this all his life, but he never really succeeded. His father was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic party, which made it all about politics at home, and later his brother also became governor of Sicily for the same party. Mattarella herself was much more into law and science, but when his brother was murdered by the mafia in 1980 – the first time the Italian public saw him was in a photo of him pulling his bloodied brother out of a car – he nevertheless decided to put his personal preferences aside and dedicate his life to the service of the public interest. Henceforth he would fight for a better Italy through politics.
He fought as a politician for a mafia-free Sicily, was a parliamentarian in Rome for many years and served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Education and Minister of Defence. It wasn’t until he was elected a judge to the Constitutional Court in 2011, well after his retirement age, that he decided to say goodbye to politics and return to his old love: the law.
At least, that was the intention, because when he was put forward as presidential candidate by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in 2015, he suddenly won those elections. A journalist who asked the sober-looking Mattarella after that election if he was happy, was answered: ‘Happy? That’s not the point.’
No favor for Renzi
His own feelings always came second to Mattarella, far behind the national interest. This became apparent in 2016, for example, when Prime Minister Renzi, who thought that according to good Italian custom he still owed a favor from the man who was president thanks to him, asked for early elections. However, Mattarella refused and appointed a business cabinet instead. Renzi, Mattarella’s party colleague, of course, was so displeased with the decision that he did not speak to him for three years.
Precisely because Mattarella structurally refused to go along with the typical Roman backroom scheming, he became the most beloved politician in the country in seven years. When he took office, he was taunted for not fitting the throne of a loud and colorful country known the world over for its Ferraris and Lamborghinis, a melancholy-looking seventies of few words wheeling himself in a gray Fiat Panda. However, on his impending resignation, many Italians are realizing that in recent years Mattarella has been exactly what their country needed, namely a beacon of calm amid an ever-overwhelming political landscape; a statesman who elevated grayness to political value and thereby saved his country several times.
What would have happened if in 2018, just after the Italian people had elected the first right-wing populist government in Western Europe, he had not asked the parties concerned to reconsider the desired appointment of Paolo Savona as Minister of Finance? , a convinced Eurosceptic who once said the euro is a ‘historic mistake’?
And what would have happened to the Italian economy if last year, in the midst of a devastating corona crisis, it had listened to the populists and called new elections, instead of appointing technocrat Mario Draghi as prime minister, a captain who finally brought Italy towards that end? coveted quiet waterway?
Possible fall of government
It is not without reason that 65.8 percent of those polled in a recent poll by research agency Youtrend said they would be satisfied if Mattarella just stays on as president. That is possible in theory. After all, the only potential successor on which the political parties seem to agree is current Prime Minister Draghi. And everyone knows: as soon as he leaves as prime minister, his government will most likely also fall, with all the chaotic consequences that entails.
If they ask him to stay on until the political stalemate is over, Mattarella’s devotion to duty, the longing politician who spent a lifetime effacing himself in favor of his homeland, may compel him to agree. But he himself will undoubtedly hope that it remains quiet.
‘Poor man,’ wrote the Italian newspaper La Republica therefore this week. “The more they cheer him on, the more afraid he becomes that they will lock him up again in the center of power.”