At the end of January Montecitorio was transformed for a few days from "the theater of our democracy into the theater of the absurd".
The re-election of Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale took place on this stage, as Paolo Armaroli writes in "Mattarella 1 & 2. Draghi's umbrella. Pencil portraits of the 12 presidents", presented to the Chamber's parliamentary groups in the Auletta.
From the point of view of those who lived in Parliament as a deputy (from the National Alliance, in the opposition), as a jurist and as a journalist, Armaroli tells of when "everything seemed lost": "In January Mattarella was about to leave, he considered the Quirinale a sort of cage, and the prime minister without his umbrella risked being skewered by party flags.
Of those days Armaroli recalls "many anomalies" and "singular if not ridiculous episodes", from abstention to the "President of the Chamber Fico who puts his hands on and reads only the surname on the ballots", from "Salvini presenting the three magi" up to "the apotheosis with the stadium applause of the parliamentarians, to Mattarella and to themselves for the narrow escape".
Among the guests of the debate, moderated by Stefano Folli, the deputy dem Stefano Ceccanti recalled that the "transversal party that was working for re-election thought that a change to the Colle also meant overwhelming the emergency government, to which there were no alternatives".
On the other hand, he added, a system where "
The Mattarella bis "is not a success story but a defeat for politics not to find the synthesis on a high personality", underlined Ginevra Cerrina Feroni, vice president of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data, who gave Armaroli a suggestion for a new book: "We would need one on the formal and the living constitution, given that we have reached a disconnect between the form and the lived life of constitutional law".
