Why is the arrest of Liguria’s governor Giovanni Toti shaking the Italian political world like an earthquake?
First, the charges are serious. Toti , 55, was placed on house arrest on Tuesday morning; according to the Genoa’s prosecutor’s office, the governor is under investigation for corruption related to the granting of favors for the exploitation of the Genoa harbor, the largest in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. Among those under investigation, also the former head of the Genoa harbor Paolo Emilio Signorini and several businessmen and middlemen.
Then, the timing of the scandal is crucial. Italy just launched the electoral campaign for the June European elections – officially at least, since the country is in permanent electoral campaign mood.
Toti was a former journalist in Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire who became a member of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, and an important cog in the tycoon’s political machine. As many former faithfuls, he distanced himself from Berlusconi’s waning influence and in 2019 founded his own small group, “Italia al centro”, later merged into “Noi moderati” (We Moderates), today a very junior party of the government coalition headed by PM Giorgia Meloni’s.
Toti is not a candidate for the European parliament himself. But he used to be a member of the Brussels chamber and he is a prominent political figure, twice elected as the head of the Liguria region. The scandal, with the added whiff of Mafia connections for a couple of the involved people, created a furious backlash from the government’s parties.
Apart from underlining their obdurate “garantismo” (that is, declaring that no presumed innocent has an obligation to resign from office merely because they are under investigation) many of the politicians from the government’s coalition pulled out an old Berlusconi’s trope about the “giustizia a orologeria”, a way of saying that the prosecutors time their revelations to coincide with important political or electoral events. In this case the investigation went on for at least three years, and the arrests came 25 days before Italians are due to the polls.
On the other hand, the two main opposition parties in Italy’s multi-fragmented political landscape, the Five Stars movement and the leftist Democratic party, could barely restrain their glee. Giuseppe Conti, the Five Stars leader, underlined the seriousness of the charges, asking Toti to draw his conclusions, and spoke about the “moral issue” haunting the Italian politics.
The Democratic Party in Liguria spoke of “a situation we knew about and denounced many times”.
But, whatever the truth about Governor Toti’s responsibilities, it remains to be seen whether the Genoa story will have any impact on the electoral outcome, and on Giorgia Meloni’s hopes to obtain results that will strengthen her hold on Italy, and possibly crown her as the most successful right-wing leader in Europe. Italy suffers indeed from a “moral issue”, so much so that Italians are accustomed to accusations of corruption against politicians of all stripes, taking it as par for the course.
