Giuseppe Conte’s mysterious and inexplicable talent

Giuseppe Conte is a disaster. Yet he locked down Italy at just the right moment, putting the country at the forefront in Europe and the world. Yet he secured the billions needed to keep going and prevent a total collapse, wringing them out of a group of reluctant partners in Brussels. Yet he reduced the excessive number of seats in Parliament. Yet he introduced the Universal Basic Income without a hitch and without breaking the budget. Yet he organised the biggest reform since Segni’s agricultural reform, Fanfani’s ‘Piano Casa’, and the healthcare reforms of the ultra-co-operative era: the marvellous ‘110 per cent’ scheme – not for me, as I haven’t benefited from it, but for the whole country, which has lived through it and survived despite all the nonsense to the contrary. He doesn’t speak – at least to me – he croaks. When he croaks about genocide, I’d strangle him with my big hands. When he croaks about stable peace and popular democracy in the pay of Putin and his army, I’d slit his throat with a kitchen knife. When he appears, I switch off. When people ask me: ‘Should we ally ourselves with him?’ I laugh. A Mr Nobody in these times of ongoing odysseys – not ours, that of Homer and Augusto Privitera, nor Nolan’s, but that of the ‘hotel party’ which snatched the leadership from ‘Grillozzo’, who, compared to Giuseppi, is a common fool.

Conte is an opportunist. An unreliable character. A brazen political turncoat and chameleon. But one cannot be blind to the facts. Meloni aside – who is preparing to win the next election without even putting up a fight (make a note of this nonsense, aureo cum lapillo) – Conte has been what one might call a statesman. A man of the system, who has understood just how fragile and corrupt the world’s most efficient system is, at this moment in time and perhaps for many decades. He needs no advice from Goffredo Bettini, who has been supporting and promoting him for years with tireless and poorly concealed zeal. His ruling class is far superior to that gang of cut-throats gathered in the wretched PD. His track record is unrivalled.

The danger he poses in foreign and security policy – the queen of politics – is immense. I wouldn’t vote for him even under torture – that’s what people always say – but I love casting a wasted vote, so I’ll vote for Calenda, because I hold Meloni, Lollobrigida and Donzelli in high regard, and I adore Taja & Zaia, but I just can’t bring myself to go that far. Family reasons. However, I’m on the lookout for someone to explain the mystery of Conte to me. Now that so many people, having rightly mocked him – and rightly mocked me too, for writing about him in these terms for years – have discovered that he’s actually quite a shrewd political mind, I’ll be glad to find the oracle capable of revealing what lies beneath, behind, in front of and beside Nobody. May some nymph or Athena protect him. I would not want Giuseppi, after having once again ensured that my favourite student, Elly Schlein, and her court of cunning fools lost the election, to emerge as a Cyclops of the opposition, snatching votes and support from elsewhere, just as he managed to do with that poor soul from Bibbiano.