Electrolux will not let Ilva be forgotten

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni decided yesterday mid-afternoon to take credit for the Electrolux agreement as well, which had been reached at 2 am the previous night between the metalworkers’ unions and the Swedish multinational. The deal is a decent compromise that sees Electrolux backtracking on the redundancies and the most painful cuts, whilst accompanying the whole thing with a handful of investments. Unfortunately, however, the signed document guarantees neither that the Swedes have regained the motivation to remain key players in the household appliances market, nor that a possible sale to the Chinese firm Midea has been ruled out. But for Meloni, these are mere details; the Prime Minister has decided to play for broke and claim credit for any event that might help her build electoral momentum.

For example, she has already decided that on 9 November she will be in Novara for the laying of the foundation stone of the Silicon Box factory, the Singaporean chip manufacturer that has chosen to invest in Italy. Whilst Meloni has her sights set on the elections in the medium term, in the short term she has another, less publicised objective: she needs to make people forget the Ilva fiasco, the dramatic consequences of which are yet to be fully understood. In recent years, the government has dithered and ultimately found itself caught between the dictates of the judiciary and a lack of genuine buyers. However, whilst it is true that, relying on her undoubted communication skills, Meloni may succeed in ensuring that the good (industrial) news prevails over the bad, it is also true that she operates in a monopoly.

While he is capable of captivating an assembly of craftspeople and then popping over to a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Piedmont, it is also true that those who ought to be his rivals, Schlein and Conte, seem like complete outsiders. They are probably unfamiliar with the details of the Electrolux or Silicon Box cases and are, in any event, incapable of taking any stance whatsoever on the reform of the craft sector. In the lexicon of sports journalism, they are non-starters. And Meloni is relishing it.