Schlein seeks “after work” in Gentiloni and thinks about Zingaretti’s foundation –

Look Brunello

July 25, 2024

“What is Paolo doing?” has become a bit of a new way for two people from the Democratic Party to recognize each other when they greet each other in Rome. Not that the fact is not relevant, objectively it has happened a few times: so Paolo Gentiloni is about to leave his post as commissioner in Brussels and has not yet found his next job. The last time it happened, that is, when he was simply a member of the Democratic Party, in 2013, the following year he was promoted by Matteo Renzi to Foreign Minister, then, ca va sans dire, directly to Prime Minister. From that period a sort of maxim was born: never leave Gentiloni without a post, because then he becomes the natural candidate to take yours.

In the sense that Paolo has transformed himself over time into the personification of the Republic’s reserve, you can make him do anything and he remains with that unchanging look, the ready quip, in perfect “Gentilonian” style, or fish in a barrel. Saying and not saying, alluding with a measured tone of voice, pronouncing the most terrible jab but diluting it with a smile, in short unmistakable qualities, that the subject in question has learned after perilous navigations around the left, not even in a Nanni Moretti film. Paolo is also a friend of everyone, he became a friend of Silvio Berlusconi and the Mediaset world, as Minister of Communications of the second Prodi, to say that it would have been an impossible undertaking for anyone. Not for him, who grew up with Francesco Rutelli at the Campidoglio, the Italian version of “Fame, sarà famosi”, accompanied by the “best of youth”, tennis matches with Ermete Realacci and Chicco Testa, and here he was already pure Enrico Vanzina, a “Sapore di mare” but under the Dome.

Now at the Nazareno, Elly’s friends tell her that she has to worry, get busy, in short find him a job. She, who may have become pop but has not yet entered the mood of the important party comrade, immediately thought of the Foundation, the one invented by Gianni Cuperlo and then donated by Elly with great dismay to Nicola Zingaretti. In short, the Demo Foundation, which is the real railway after-work for Democratic Party members who are approaching retirement or underemployed. For example, Cuperlo founded it when he had a lot of free time, Renzi did not send him to Parliament and so the intellectual from Trieste cultivated that little object with loving care. Then it passed to the former president of the Lazio Region, who was in fact former, also as secretary of the Democratic Party, something had to be found for him.

Paolo listens to the proposals and turns up his nose, it’s that this time too the usual “Florentine” has got in the way. What would have occurred to Renzi to crown Elly Schlein and clear the way for her to be a candidate for Palazzo Chigi? Wouldn’t a unifier have been needed? And who better than him? Who after all was a Green before Bonelli, a Renzian before Renzi, a Zingarettian before Zingaretti, and even him, in his time, no one had seen him coming, especially in the primaries in Rome. Unifier, that’s the right word for a former European Commissioner, who has already become a reserve of the Republic, Elly take note.