The Honourable Sigfrido

Just as a spinning matchstick eventually lands on someone, burning them, so – speaking of Ranucci – it goes round and round, and it’s bound to fall to someone. To put him forward as a candidate. There’s no discussion of party line or even internal balances, but after the latest news from Zimbabwe (a story that’s one big safari with Lavitola), what ends up in the hands of whoever takes it is nothing but a burn: “Yeah, well, if we put him forward, it’ll end up like it did with Soumahoro”, the famous AVS figurehead candidate who later became a political nightmare. So says the executive close to Nicola Fratoianni, and round and round it goes: the misfortunes of the Alliance of Greens and the Left, known as AVS, always seem to arrive with an African postmark.

And yet we’re told that Angelo Bonelli, the leader of the Greens who invited Ranucci to the AVS party on 9 September, might be giving the matter some thought. Even though Bonelli himself denies it, and does so with the very same firmness with which he denied Ilaria Salis’s candidacy two days before presenting her at a press conference. After all, the autumn game has already begun: who will put Ranucci, the Honourable Sigfrido, forward as a candidate? Who knows. Sig, as they called him on Report, or ‘Lello’ as they called him in his native Garbatella, has gone from ‘I’ll never go into politics’ to ‘I’m not ruling anything out, but who would put me forward?’. And as is clear enough, whilst the summer’s game revolved around clams and ‘love bombs’ at the Cefalù restaurant – where all the characters from Italian-style comedy, from Fabrizio Corona to Mariarosaria Boccia, were dancing about – the game at the start of autumn is instead that of the phantom candidacy, denied even by Giuseppe Conte whilst, nevertheless, around him – amongst Five Star Movement supporters and political insiders – Sigfrido’s defenders are multiplying. “With all these denials, they’ll end up holding primaries just to decide who gets him,” jokes Galeazzo Bignami, the FdI group leader in the Chamber of Deputies.

The candidacy came about through a series of denials, much like certain saints who reveal themselves only to non-believers. Lavitola is no longer around – the man who first had the brilliant insight (and credit where credit is due) – but since in Italy the age of fake news never ends, a mysterious SWG poll is now doing the rounds, revealed on Thursday by Franco Bechis in Open; the text is known, but the client remains unknown. No one commissioned it. It is happening of its own accord, it seems, like the tides. “I don’t know if Ranucci has voters, but he certainly has an audience,” observes Alessandra Ghisleri of Euromedia Research. And Livio Gigliuto of the Piepoli Institute rounds off the prognosis: “The audience can become the electorate.”

On the other hand, Ranucci – the Honourable Sigfrido – has a packed tour schedule right through to April; he has his book, his awards, his daily Facebook post which the nation awaits in the morning just as eagerly as it awaits Branko’s horoscope; and, above all, he has an election campaign which, measured in kilometres and handshakes, is already more intense than those of Schlein and Meloni put together. The only missing element is his constituency, which, in the Italian system, remains the least significant detail right up to the very end.