Montecitorio begins to prepare for the election of the President of the Republic.
A very important appointment, that of the voting for the choice of who will succeed Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale, which will be held in the second half of January,
probably starting from Monday 24
.
By then, if the trend recorded up to now continues, the contagion situation determined by the omicron variant of Covid
could complicate things
.
Making it even more difficult to allow the little more than a thousand 'big voters' and the surrounding journalists and parliamentary officials to experience this phase in safety.
Waiting for the President of the Chamber Roberto Fico to officially communicate on Tuesday, with its publication in the Official Gazette of the convocation, the starting date of the voting - asking the Regions to elect their delegates who will integrate the Parliament in joint session - at the reopening of the Palace with the new year, the workers entered the field.
In the courtyard of honor, which in the past was usually reserved for the stations of the television networks that follow the voting for the Quirinale, workers carry out measurements and delimit spaces. In the Transatlantic too, workers were noticed at work, engaged in setting up two electrical panels, while a team of painters is retouching the vaults of the corridors of honor, the passages that lead from the main entrance to the Transatlantic, in white.
However, nothing is yet known about how the voting will be organized to avoid as much as possible the gathering in the premises of the Palace of well over a thousand people. The Chamber's "internal CTS", made up of executives from the Montecitorio administration and experts, is evaluating anti-covid measures to ensure that voting can be held in conditions of maximum security for all. Those technical decisions will then be ratified by the College of Quaestors which is expected to meet on 11 January.
At that time, it is explained, all knots will be dissolved in terms of opportunity and politics.
There are many knots to deal with.
If it seems clear enough that there will be a vote, as always, in the Chamber of Deputies, it is not yet known how many votes will be held per day to ensure the sanitation of the Chamber.
Another quite safe device is that of staggering the voters by time slot, so as to scatter them around the large halls of the Palace, making them enter the hall in groups and only for the time strictly necessary to write a name and deposit the ballot in the "salad bowl" , as the green satin and wicker urn that collects the votes is called in parliamentary jargon.