“Because we will heal”. Health Minister Roberto Speranza explains it to us, in the midst of a pandemic, he found the time to write a book on coronavirus.
It matters little that the government arrived totally unprepared for the “second wave”, although it had largely foreseen it. “The Minister of Hope, Health”, as the Tg1 presenter who committed this terrible gaffe on 2 September renamed it, has been the most loved government exponent of Italians for months, immediately after Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. A certificate of esteem and trust that is granted to him despite a very poor management of the emergency from coronavirus: the Immuni app turned out to be a flop, thousands of doctors, nurses and intensive care beds are missing. The only innovative idea, recently given birth by the owner of Health, is the practice of reporting to stop any private parties. “It is clear that we will also increase controls, there will be reports”, he declared during an interview with Fabio Fazio in which he spoke of the ban on having private dinners with more than six people. Prohibition, which then became council e the terrible gaffe with a Soviet flavor it was forgotten within a few days because, strangely enough, the minister, despite everything, likes it. “Speranza has the reassuring aspect of a typical good father of a family and is loved by Italians because people think he is the one to heal them. Whether they love him a lot or a little, it doesn’t matter, ”explains the pollster Nicola Piepoli consulted by ilGiornale.it. But how did a forty-year-old from Potenza with a shy and not very charismatic character, to take on such an important role? To understand this, it is necessary to retrace his political career.
“I have a great passion for historical studies which I have cultivated, even after graduating in Political Science, earning a PhD in History of Mediterranean Europe. I am passionate about wine and good food. I love Totti’s Rome and the evenings around with the friends of a lifetime “, she writes about himself on his personal website the minister who, after some experiences abroad, chose to return to ‘his’ Basilicata. It is from here that Speranza, born in 1979, begins to take its first steps within the DS and, at the age of 25, is elected city councilor in Potenza. In 2005 he was already in the national executive of the Youth Left, a youth movement of the Left Democrats of which he became president two years later. We are in 2007 and the DS are moving towards dissolution to make room for that Pd “Majority vocation” much sponsored by the then candidate for prime minister of the center-left, Walter Veltroni. Speranza, an iron Dalemian first and then a Bersanian, in 2009 took up the post of regional secretary of the new party in Basilicata. “He is one of the last to make a career in the party, a type of career that today could no longer be done because that type of party structure no longer exists”, explains one of our sources who has known Speranza since the current holder of the Ministry of Health was part of the Committee that supported the candidacy for premier of Pierluigi Bersani. It was 2012 and, at the time, “he was regional secretary when holding that position meant becoming the plenipotentiary on candidates for political elections”, underlines our source.
Cartoonist Vauro describes Speranza as a “young old man”, an image that perfectly matches the character. “He did not have great leadership skills, but he knew how to keep the various souls together and do the work of the gray man of the apparatus,” says those who knew him closely. “He is the classic party exponent who, then, could have been both the Minister of Transport, Education or Health”, adds those who think that Speranza is “the classic bureaucrat who always manages to keep himself afloat because he never says a word out of place”. The only flicker, if we want to call it that, dates back to 2015 when he resigned as leader of the Chamber after the then Prime Minister Matteo Renzi decides to put his trust in Italicum. Speranza, who had entered Parliament two years earlier and who held that role as the leading man of the Bersanian majority, suddenly found himself in the minority, is leaving. In 2017 the fracture with the Renziano Democratic Party was definitively consumed and Speranza, together with Pier Luigi Bersani and Arturo Scotto, founded Article 1 in an attempt to create a kind of mini-apparatus similar to the one he grew up in.
Two years later his shy and basically taciturn character helped him get nominated, also thanks to the hand of Massimo D’Alema, Minister of Health of the Giallorossi government. “He is not a person who wants to speak necessarily but, then, this attitude gives the idea that he disappears. But compared to people who end up saying things out of place, he represents the man of prudence ”, his former party comrades explain to us again. The pollster Piepoli, in this regard, clarifies: “Only a malevolent public opinion can think that Speranza is a puppet and that the real minister is the grillino Sileri” who, unlike the leader of Article 1, is a doctor. The perception of public opinion is that “if a politician does not speak, then it means that he acts”. Then, however, we must always see what political actions it takes. “We do not know if it was a strategic choice of the government or if the figures of Arcuri or the deputy technical minister Sileri could be more reassuring. The fact is that, in the lockdown phase, there was an absence of the minister who, in these moments of crisis, should not be there “, attacks the deputy Marcello Gemmato, Health Manager of Fratelli d’Italia. The Melonian exponent, however, gives credit to the minister for having acted as a “pungiball”. “He very often came to the Chamber to report, before each Dpcm, even when it would have been the responsibility of Prime Minister Conte, as in the case of the extension of the state of emergency”, concludes Gemmato.
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