Salvini and chemical castration. The government is forcing people to say “ban”

Rome. Here they are. Or rather, here they are again. These are Matteo Salvini’s mad scissors. Whilst it is true that the Transport Minister cuts very few ribbons – very few public works – he certainly does not shy away from cutting off testicles. But be careful: do not call it ‘chemical castration’ – not anymore. Do not call it ‘castration’ but rather ‘androgen blockade’. The new Lega and the new language.

According to Il Foglio’s sources, therefore, the League secretary has been pushing for a round-table discussion for about fifteen days. It has been postponed time and again. At least since 2022. Under threat from Vannacci’s ‘dirty dozen’ – and concerned about his four per cent – Salvini tried again two weeks ago. And in the Council of Ministers, he thus requested an item on the agenda. At the top – as per the usual script – the remedy against rapists: chemical castration. There it is again.

Carlo Nordio, the proposal’s primary recipient, appeared horrified. The same expression then spread across the faces of the other undersecretaries and ministers. Everyone shook their heads until Andrea Ostellari, the undersecretary for Justice representing the Lega, came up with an idea. Salvini’s representative, in his brief negotiations with Nordio, found a workaround. The meeting will go ahead, but from now on, terms associated with a chemist (chemistry) or a butcher (castration) will be banned. In their place, Salvini will always use the clinical term employed by healthcare professionals: ‘androgen blockade’.

In this regard, Undersecretary Ostellari has vouched for him. And he has promised that Salvini will commit himself, not only in the Council of Ministers nor merely in Parliament. But even – as he put it – on television. Even on those programmes where the presenters, being extremely scrupulous, urge everyone (even the minister) not to use difficult words, technical terms, or worse still, Greek terms, and never, ever to quote anything. In short, not to use words that might put off the viewer and, consequently, the voter.

Forza Italia has confirmed that talks are imminent but is keeping its distance: “When the time comes, the party will state its position.” Meanwhile, Fratelli d’Italia is watching from the sidelines and summing up the situation with a phrase they already gave us months ago: “Better to kick the bucket than to kick Salvini out.”

The League leader, they explain, is weak. And the more he gets worked up in the run-up to the vote, ‘the more he hurts us’. His allies are thus trying to rein him in, to appease him, even to muzzle him, with the fatal – and surreal – result of a politically correct Salvini. A Salvini who is no longer Salvini since, as Ciriaco De Mita said before he died, “he does not speak, but makes sounds”. And whilst “chemical castration” certainly has a televisual, carnal, even magical ring to it, “androgen blockade” sounds more like an anaesthetic. It lacks testosterone. Not to mention, of course, that this would be a ‘block’ on a voluntary basis. That is to say, a non-coercive pharmacological procedure (which is only compulsory in Poland and Russia), far removed from the vehemence of television, but which nonetheless poses problems for criminal law and, even more so, for the Catholic Church.

He proposed chemical castration; they imposed lexical castration. Yet no one realised that vocabulary is the Captain’s true chemistry. The resonant words ‘bulldozer’, ‘Italians’, ‘take away the key’ form his magic. He sets the table, seeking the move to overturn Vannacci; they reduce his rhetoric to a leaflet. The more he struggles, the tighter they pull his straitjacket; the more ground he attempts to regain, the more he loses his words, and the more he loses his words, the more he loses Matteo Salvini.