Meloni and the ‘blame game’. She clashes with Bonelli and Conte: “If you’ve done everything right, why are we here?”

The real Italian alibi: ‘And who takes responsibility?’. After a day in Pauristan, we now have Scaricabarilistan. A headteacher who does his job either ends up on the front page as a hero or in a magistrate’s records. Meloni convenes a meeting with opposition leaders and announces a protocol to prevent panic. From today, schools will close following a ‘persistent’ danger, but who decides how persistent it is? The headteacher calls the prefect and the prefect orders the evacuation. Headteachers and prefects are unhappy. The Ministry of the Interior promises to provide operational guidelines to the prefects. A maze. Mattarella’s smile – he appreciated Meloni’s gesture, and he did appreciate it – remains just a smile.

The scene. The Green Room. Palazzo Chigi. Meloni, standing in the doorway, welcomes the opposition. Calenda kisses her hand (this scene will be cut during post-production). At the government table: Fazzolari, Ciriani, Piantedosi, Tajani, Meloni, Salvini, Crosetto and Mantovano. On the other side: Schlein, Conte, Fratoianni, Bonelli, Calenda, Magi, Steger (representing linguistic minorities) and Ziello, Vannacci’s deputy. Seated. Piantedosi explains that “we cannot hire hackers because we would have to pay them as top-tier executives”. Renzi, who received a call from Agnese (“it’s not on that my wife should ring and say: ‘they’re evacuating’ because we’re missing an antivirus programme”), points out that he was the first to invest in cyber security. Conte takes the floor: “And I set up the COR.” Calenda knows this: “It was the Russians, Putin.” Bonelli interjects: “Mr President, we won’t stop hackers with cannons.” Meloni replies: “Well, say that this too is defence – why don’t you say so?” She wants to take the floor in the Chamber, turn the briefing into a formal statement, put it to a vote, and challenge those who “lie about defence”. Trust me, in two years’ time we’ll have a parliamentary anti-spam committee.

This is how it will end, as Meloni has already announced during talks with the opposition: the ACN, led by the highly capable professional Andrea Quacivi – formerly of Sogei – will be strengthened. The outcome will feature cybersecurity experts appearing on television, while Meloni remains in Parliament. She intends to refute all the ‘nonsense’ about cuts to cybersecurity and to respond to those—such as Franco Gabrielli, the former Chief of Police, who is increasingly likely to stand in the primaries—who mock her: ‘When will the anti-Misoginistan decree be issued?’. They have tried sitting around the table, shaking hands, but the rhetoric ends up in the election manifestos. Even the very image of this table is a victory for the fools, for the pirates. Riccardo Magi says when he takes the floor: ‘What a spectacle we’re making of ourselves! What might anyone seeing us sitting here today think? That they’ve won.’ They might think that a raspberry is more dangerous than a fighter-bomber. Meloni thanks them for their cooperation, but the spell is broken by Conte, who is the most stern in reminding them of the cuts to cyber-security. But what cuts? Meloni and Mantovano ask themselves, exchanging glances. Conte points out that he had left the Ministry of Innovation, but “unfortunately, you’ve dismantled it. We need a single coordination body for all intelligence agencies”. Meloni retorts: “If you’ve done everything right, why are we here?”

Mantovano lists the figures for closed schools and points out that, out of over six thousand alerts, nearly 1,800 schools – and therefore headteachers – plucked up the courage, kept their cool and kept the schools open. No one, not even Schlein – who is the most diligent and has done her homework – manages to address the real dilemma: who bears responsibility for closing schools, and to whom? According to Schlein, ‘if we have to buy systems from the Americans instead of developing our own, we increase our dependence and go from the frying pan into the fire’. Edoardo Ziello of Futuro Nazionale – the Vannacciano who has put forward a sound proposal to expand the role of the digital transition officer – remarked as soon as he stepped out: ‘Schlein brought her notes with her, and they were so densely written that you couldn’t even read them’. As usual, it is Renzi who injects the most painful barb: “Who is responsible for cyber-security? Foreign Affairs, the Home Office? The intelligence services or the ACN?” He hits the nail on the head regarding this endless dispute between Crosetto and Mantovano over the intelligence services. Crosetto is the most honest when he admits: “We don’t have any hackers. The ones we do have don’t come to work for us.”

The Ministry of Defence considered: “Do you know who we could use? Those individuals we’ve arrested, who are currently in prison. We could put them to work and have them serve their sentences. But would the opposition agree?”. A year ago already, Crosetto, in his report to the Defence Committee on 25 January 2025, noted that “an actor with limited resources can inflict significant damage on states’ critical infrastructure”, and his draft bill on a cyber authority is also before the Senate. If the left wants a single authority, why doesn’t it use the draft bill as a starting point? It does not, because, as Fratoianni puts it, “we don’t want ‘friends of friends’ in these agencies”. The emergency fizzles out into political patronage, as seen at the RAI, and gradually into a “oh well, let’s not get carried away” attitude. Calenda, in a moment of levity, asks Bonelli this question: “Just out of curiosity, do you ride a horse?”

Piantedosi compares the Misoginistan emails “to the letters pupils used to send at school in our day”, and links these warnings to 17 October. Bonelli hears this and pounces: “So you’re linking these incidents together? Is that what you’re doing?”. The Ministry of Defence responds to the left’s accusations by stating that 8 billion has been earmarked from 2019 to 2040 to counter the hybrid threat. The two-and-a-half-hour session concludes with Meloni covering her ground: “You can’t go out and say we have no proposals.” Schlein retorts that “you do have them, but they’re ours.” Salvini remains silent throughout the meeting, and it is a silence that is unnerving. Fazzolari’s silence is that of a man in command.

Anyone leaving the room learns that, on the world stage, Carlo Messina of Intesa SanPaolo has just attacked the government, that Giorgetti describes himself as a ‘Habsburg minister’ and that, as of today, FdI has a clear idea: ‘Perhaps the time has come to really campaign against the banks. Messina deserves credit for one thing: bringing out the Fazzolari in all of us’. In Milan, Attilio Fontana, the ‘hidalgo’, is siding with the headteachers, because their discretion is also a form of autonomy, and ‘you cannot force headteachers not to evacuate’. A brief note. News sites around the world are reporting that “Microsoft” has gone down. In Rome this evening, the news is that Calenda is apparently spreading a story about Schlein that is unfavourable to her (he is said to have mentioned Little Red Riding Hood), but “it’s not true, trust me”. A round table on false bomb alerts is being cleared away by false rumours. What better parable to describe these times?