Anastasio and Mussolini
The case of Claudio Anastasio is emblematic of an institutional ignorance that went beyond all limits of decency. The manager, appointed last autumn by the Meloni government to lead 3-I S.p.A. , the company that manages the software of Inps, Inail and Istat, resigned after one of those situations in which one really wonders about the human, cultural and institutional dimension of the protagonist. Those situations in which - with a certain horrid taste - one would like to know what went through the mind of a manager of this level while writing (or had someone write) an email of that tenor and content and pressing enter to deliver it to the members of the company board of directors.The content consists of a precise quotation from Benito Mussolini's speech to the Montecitorio on January 3, 1925, when the dictator assumed responsibility for the assassination of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, which took place the previous year after reports of elections of April 1924. A junction that according to historians closed the antechamber of the Ventennio sanctioning the definitive dictatorial turn of the regime. Except that in this Anastasio's version the abbreviation 3-I is interspersed in the text or used to replace “fascism”.
Let's take it very clearly: but where exactly do these people think they live? What level of awareness do they have of the weight of their positions? Do they think that the presidency of some public body guarantees them immunity from nonsense, from disrespect, from senseless attacks, not to mention mercilessly mangled historical references? And what consideration do they have of their internal communications and of the role they play, too often mistaken for a pulpit of their political "passions"?
Who is Claudio Anastasio, the public manager who copied a speech by Mussolini in a company email Not just any speech, but the claim of Matteotti's murder which marks the beginning of the dictatorship. Anastasio copied and pasted it, replacing the word "fascism" with the name of the company, 3-I spa, an IT company Inps, Inail and Istat More. The fascist positions are evidently completely incompatible with the roles in the public administration but, even if we want to go to the unacceptable level of regardless of the content, in cases such as that of Anastasio - just named last November - we witness in an obtuse and even self-defeating way the inexorable disappearance of the institutional posture. Either you feel so strong that you can challenge anyone even with the most indefensible performances or, worse, you don't have the slightest perception of your role. In both cases, a great danger for the country certainly not immediately but because it signals a profound crisis of the "human capital" and of the ruling class that we will pay in the medium to long term. Among other things, if this is what the Meloni executive has placed around in the first rounds of appointments in recent months, who knows what we can expect for the spring batch, from Eni to Terna, from Leonardo to some subsidiaries of Ferrovie dello State.
The Anastasio affair - the only merit for which we will remember him will be his timely resignation - then returns to raise another issue, one of the causes of the depressing panorama we are facing in the context of public appointments: more transparency is needed even when the process passes through the scrutiny of parliamentary commissions, the scientific spoils system must be interrupted, international competitions are needed for all positions for top management roles, moreover in strategic sectors. These are points on which courts, agencies and other authorities - in turn, in the second and third cases, daughters of a sick system of appointments, in an all-Italian vicious circle - have intervened a thousand times. As long as the seats are only formally subject to constraints, rules and controls but in fact in the full availability of the government on duty and not assigned only to the service of the community, regardless of the color of those who sit in Palazzo Chigi, we will find too many Anastasio perhaps even convinced to be nice.