Maranza in a sweatshirt or a robe?

In the public eye, a magistrate publicly insulting the Prime Minister for refusing to grant around 1 billion euros in back pay to magistrates may have the same political impact as a Maranza resident smashing shop windows. “The little woman from the suburbs doesn’t have time to sign a decree. An ad acta commissioner will sort it out! Poor Italy” is the comment that appeared on the Facebook profile of Alessandro Di Cicco, a deputy public prosecutor in Rome. The reference is to Giorgia Meloni, who had told Adnkronos: “In all conscience, I cannot put my signature to a Prime Ministerial Decree (DPCM) under which I would have to allocate nearly one billion euros to pay rises for magistrates”, adding that the sum “is ten times” what the government needs to resolve the crisis “in the road haulage sector and prevent the delivery of goods from coming to a standstill throughout Italy”.

The Prime Minister’s resignation formally makes no sense, because this is not a discretionary decision but a matter of complying with a court ruling. Yet in the eyes of the public, particularly against a backdrop of economic hardship, does a magistrate not demonstrate a greater respect for the institutions by refraining from using such vulgar language to demand a hefty pay rise? Public Prosecutor Di Cicco stated that he was not the author of the post and that he had been the victim of a cyberattack: “My Facebook profile was hacked and I’m on my way to the police station to report it,” he said. ‘I didn’t write that post about the Prime Minister.’ The likelihood that a hacker gained access to a public prosecutor’s social media profile to pen a post full of insults against the Prime Minister – who is refusing to give money to his victim and his colleagues – is, at first glance, rather remote. Not so much because of the insult ‘dwarf from the suburbs’ – which is more befitting the language of a scoundrel – but because of the knowledge of the role played in the dispute by a ‘commissario ad acta’. The Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office will certainly investigate Prosecutor Di Cicco’s complaint against persons unknown thoroughly, but for many ordinary people – who already have little faith in the institutions – this will reinforce the idea that the ‘maranza’ wear tracksuits, but some of them also don the judge’s robe.