“It’s all done, just one last bureaucratic step missing,” they tell us from Palazzo Chigi. Raffaele Fitto is the Italian commissioner in pectore. The Roman visit of the European popular leader, Manfred Weber, has sealed it. Even plastically, by going straight to Fitto for an hour, as soon as he landed in Rome. The Minister of European Affairs and Territorial Cohesion has mortgaged his place at the top of the European Commission. A former blue MEP of authentically popular origin, still young but already very experienced, Fitto is the most esteemed by the entourage of the President of the Commission. It will be his name on the letter that is now ready to leave Palazzo Chigi. And he will do so after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has received the reconfirmation, which she spoke about yesterday with Weber, that Italy will be the executive vice-presidency of the Union.
According to what has filtered out during the face-to-face meeting at Palazzo Chigi, which lasted over an hour and a half, the prime minister discussed the main European dossiers with the leader of the EPP, from the strategic agenda to competitiveness, through industry and migrants. At the end, no official note but, they say from the entourage of the prime minister, «the sharing of the need for a less ideological vision on the part of the new European Commission». In any case, positive meetings and all in the name of the agreement on the missing Italian name. As they also reiterate at the UDC. Weber, on his business trip to Rome, also stops at the headquarters of the party of Lorenzo Cesa and Antonio De Poli, historic members of the EPP, who reiterate the opportunity to support the Minister for European Affairs. There are no other names. And if Weber were in Rome in the role of sub-commissioner on behalf of the president of the Commission, there is no doubt about what he should tell her: Fitto is fit. He is suitable, he is ready. He could be an excellent commissioner for competition (his are the only solutions on beach resorts that have reached the Commission’s tables) as well as for the PNRR and cohesion, which he has long managed as the institution of the main beneficiary country. He also has the merit of being transversal to the entire center-right and even better introduced into the European institutions than any sherpa of Palazzo Chigi. His true great sponsor is called Björn Seibert, a name that means little to most, but represents the pinnacle of European power. He is Ursula Von der Leyen’s chief of staff. A personal friend and admirer of the minister and former governor of Puglia since Fitto sat on the benches of the EPP, Seibert is the one who prepared and instructed the Italian practice with Von der Leyen. “Seibert had already confirmed the agreement for the assignment to the minister a month ago”, confides a source who took part in the meetings. The wait for the formal indication of the government would have been only a diversion to allow Meloni to win the executive vice-presidency. The agreement on Fitto is so solid that Seibert would have suggested to Von der Leyen to bypass the obstacle of the double gender among the candidates, man-woman. Italy does not respect this, it only presents the name of a man? No big deal, it seems: that’s what everyone does.
The alternative proposals, explored at the turn of the summer, have faded. Elisabetta Belloni will remain at the head of the DIS. Letizia Moratti will be able to begin her full mandate as a MEP in September (without disdaining trips to Italy, such as the demonstration she will hold in Genoa, her constituency, in mid-September). Weber’s Roman expedition turned, last night, into a pleasant dinner among friends when he joined Antonio Tajani for a more direct and informal conversation than those he had had during the day. The Italy-Germany axis rests on that between CDU and Forza Italia, brother parties that never miss an opportunity to show themselves as such. Even Tajani’s mid-August outbursts on the Ius scholae seem to come from discussions with the Germans. While Weber has become, at the top levels of Brussels, “the lawyer of the Italians”. The Fitto solution is also popular with those who hope to bring ECR to vote more generously with the majority, in the future. And it is useful to Giorgia Meloni, who sees the hypothesis of a Meloni-bis as a red herring and knows that, by moving Fitto, she can redistribute the delegations by splitting them up without upsetting the balance of the majority.
#white #smoke #arrives #Fitto #commissioner #Tempo
2024-08-29 20:42:13
