United in Discord: The Strategic Art of Harnessing Adversity

On the left everything is controversial. The President of the Senate Ignazio La Russa, on the day of Saint Francis, accepted Michaela Biancofiore’s proposal and announced that he wanted to open up to four-legged friends: “I give you some good news. I believe that the time has come to authorize the senators to bring your pets inside the Senate”, he declared at the Fratelli d’Italia convention in Brucoli. The creator and group leader of Civici d’Italia, NM, UDC and Maie was satisfied: “A request that I had made for some time will become reality today”, she stated. This revolution was driven by the opposition and, in particular, by the Democratic Party senator Annamaria Furlan, who raised yet another sterile controversy.

“I love animals, I have always had dogs and I know the special relationship that unites us with them. But I sincerely think that the Senate has other priorities. Before worrying about the hospitality of animals, perhaps we would do better to worry about opening a nursery for daughters and sons of Senate workers. Nurseries are one of the main problems for families where both parents work and many companies have opened company nurseries. I don’t know if the time has come to authorize them. with due concern, senators to bring their pets into the Senate, as President La Russa states, but I know that this is not really an emergency that we, as an institution, need to address,” Furlan said.

Words to which Biancofiore replied in kind: “To the professional polemicists I allow myself to say that attacking the President of the Senate Ignazio La Russa, for the decision to authorize the access of pets to the exclusively personal offices of senators, is foolish, instrumental and insensitive”. Accepting four-legged friends, “with the responsibility entirely borne by parliamentarians, now occurs in many public administrations, including those on the left, such as the Municipality of Verona, the White House, the Casa Rosada, Downing Street, the Presidency of the Irish Republic and in the largest companies in the world,” he recalled. The access of animals, he also underlined, “is not an issue that excludes the possibility of creating nurseries within the Senate buildings: a fair and acceptable objective which, however, requires time, space and an expenditure budget to be part of the administration of the Senate, unlike animals.” President La Russa, he added, “has captured the common feeling of Italian families, including children and their pets”.