Let’s be clear right away: the subject of the Salvini affair, we mean the six-year jail term request for the then minister of the Interior in connection with the Open Arms affair, is not judicial but political. Or rather, it is part of that long strand that from Tangentopoli onwards we call pathology of the relations between the political and the judicial, world, men, narratives. It is a clash of Power and powers that crystallizes a deeper pathology of our democracy.
In other words, magistrates rewrite the course of Italian politics with investigations and convictions that if discussed and challenged find political support on the left or in the judges’ guilds. The watchword is: attack on our autonomy. In short, politics has not only lost the Primacy it had in the First Republic, but can no longer even protest that it is succubus.
In the case of the NGO, which was not allowed to dock, there is no crime, no humanitarian violation, no kidnapping, no hostage taking. NGOs – not all of them, of course – play politics. They refuse other ports because they “must” come to Italy where they know they will find fertile ground in the vacuity of rules and an underlying ideology called indiscriminate reception. Fundamentalist Catholics and radical leftists say that anyone who wants to come to our country, by dinghy, by boat, by swimming, brought by criminal scaphores or by more or less sympathetic ships, must be welcomed in our ports.
With this scheme, every rational vision becomes reactionary, every defense of borders becomes an act of war on the defenseless poor. The problem of mass immigration is one of the most complex of our time. No one has the magic recipe, and other European democracies also devise their own strategies. Some are stricter in so-called rejections and some less so, but even very welcoming countries like Germany have become stricter at the borders after recent knife attacks on their own territory.
Of course, then there are the laws of the sea, the written laws and the laws of conscience, respecting human lives, not endangering them, saving them anyway as a due act. But subject to that, everything else is political and governance choice. Only Y number of migrants can enter country X in a defined time. Under penalty social imbalances and an economic and cultural non-integration of the migrants themselves. Finally, Minister Salvini acted at the time on a shared attitude with the Conte I government: neither the then premier nor fellow vice-premier Di Maio denied the interior chief in that long tug-of-war with the NGO Open Arms.
Needless, today, for the Grillies-either they no longer exist or they are looking to the wide field with the PD-to pretend that they do not exist. Salvini did not act out of self-propaganda, he did not need to, but as part of a common vision that had led to a strange governmental pact, but still a pact. Short-lived, then the M5S would initiate another pact, the one with the PD.
The craziest legislature in the Republic and the pieces are still being seen today, pieces that stand in the way of the legitimate center-right executive that won the elections and put an end to the tragicomedies that marked the years from 2018 to 2022. Now what? There will be battle, and it will be a very hard battle.
The article Salvini Arms comes from TheNewyorker.
