Meloni and Pauristan. She urges calm. “One email won’t change our children’s school timetable.” Tensions over the budget

It may be a fool, it may be a catastrophe: a catastrophe of fools. 11 November 2026 will be remembered as the day of Pauristan. Six thousand schools were evacuated across Italy due to bomb threats—all hoaxes—with parents rushing to the traffic lights. These are acts of ‘soft terror’, orchestrated by a prankster who even mocks the situation and signs off as ‘Mikhail Andropov’, leader of the organisation ‘Vilayat of Misoginistan’.

What if it happens again? Meloni assures: “We will not allow an email to dictate the school calendar”. She is summoning the opposition to Palazzo Chigi today. Meloni is saying: “Now we’ll see who truly cares about defending the country. Will anyone on the left now realise how important defence is?”. While the country comes to a standstill, the Chamber of Deputies is shut away in a bubble and the government awaits approval of the Ukraine decree. Giorgetti arrives in Rome and goes to see Meloni, but there is talk of “enormous pressure” from Salvini. At 2.30 pm, Crosetto takes part in an event entitled ‘Il Paese che cambia’ with the CEOs of Fincantieri, Poste Italiane and ITA, under the watchful eye of Crosetto’s wife, Gaia Saponaro, who is coordinating the event. Afterwards, there are only high-level meetings involving Meloni, Giorgetti, Crosetto, Salvini, Tajani and Lupi. There is a shortfall in funding for the budget. It is the usual blame game directed at Giorgetti, with Salvini remarking: “If only we hadn’t fallen short by 0.1 per cent…”.

What would happen if a mad goblin were to cut off the power supply to a hospital’s intensive care units? Among Meloni’s anxieties and concerns, this scenario would feature. After a day of utter chaos, Meloni’s video arrives: “Nothing was found. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it doesn’t just affect our country. False reports on board aeroplanes have forced flights to be diverted.” To gauge the extent of the disruption caused by the ‘mother of all the madcap characters’, one need only read the USB’s call to protest. Here is the USB’s statement: “Bomb scare, hands off our schools, no to the strategy of tension!” Meloni uses the video to draw a lesson. She says: “Let’s take three points from this. Firstly, as of today, there is no evidence to suggest a real danger. Secondly, these messages are not intended to cause harm, but to instil fear. Those who write them want us to be afraid; they want chaos. Thirdly: I will not speculate; when there are facts, you will be informed.” Meloni warns that “it is possible that messages like these may still arrive. This will not be a sign that something has gone wrong, but that those sending them have nothing else. Every alert will be investigated, one by one.” This is the line of maintaining calm, and it is shared by Piantedosi and Crosetto, not least because, as the Ministry of Defence explains, “it will take time to track down those responsible”. It’s true, Crosetto has been issuing warnings for four years, but nobody – as Crosetto himself says – “listened to me. I could have capitalised on the hybrid war but I didn’t”. His concern now lies elsewhere. The Ministry of Defence believes the real risk will come later, when, due to a barrage of alerts and copycat incidents, “habituation sets in. That’s when they can really hurt us.” Crosetto is the man of the moment. He drops hints of ideas even when, still under his wife’s watchful eye, he speaks of his daughter, “the only one without TikTok. Only in the West is there freedom on social media.” The sound of car horns echoes through the Chamber. Meloni extends an invitation to the opposition, but Vannacci is absent. The general first complains, then delegates the task to Ziello. To find someone who knows about defence, one must seek out Lorenzo Guerini, a former PD minister – another who urges caution when proposing task forces, not least because we’ve set up the ACN, the Cybersecurity Agency, and have already gone through three directors. At the Ministry of Defence, officials describe a town in Romania, Ramnicu Valcea, where these ‘mad goblins’ and pirates gather, and together they play at terrifying the world, at building ‘Pauristan’. Can we really not evacuate a school when an email arrives? Crosetto recalls: “If a cable snaps, these days you’re blind and deaf. I hear people say that what happens in the rest of the world doesn’t concern us, but let’s see if the electricity or gas gets cut off.” It is a shame that in Italy, all anyone thinks about is the ‘blocked’ list-toppers. The budget summit is going so badly that corrective measures are being brought forward via amendments. Salvini keeps calling for the banks to be targeted. Again, and even more so. Giorgetti is battered and gloomy. The League is criticising him for having lost “18 billion with that 0.1 per cent from the accountants” and for listening too much to the Quirinale. That signature on the decree, as this newspaper goes to press, is still missing. It will come, of course. One must never be afraid … Today Conte returns to Palazzo Chigi alongside Schlein, Bonelli and Fratoianni, but complains of an “unprecedented format”. Meloni, on the other hand, hopes that “the nation will take its children to school”. Without fear and without speculation. For whom does the bell toll?