A Christian Democrat in Brussels: who is Fitto, from the idyll with Berlusconi to the Meloni government

The enfant prodige of Italian politics has grown up. Raffaele Fitto from Maglie, in the province of Lecce, who turned 55 at the end of August, is preparing to take up his position as Executive Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for Reforms and Cohesion. The pinnacle of a career that began very early, after a tragic bereavement: his father Salvatore, president of the Puglia Region, lost his life in a car accident in August 1988. The horizon of events. Picking up his political legacy, in the ranks of the Christian Democrat Party, was Raffaele, who, barely 20 years old, was elected to the Regional Council in May 1990, setting a national record of 75,366 personal preferences. A plebiscite. And also a recurring lesson in his life: from sorrows and failures one learns, and is reborn.

From the DC school he retains the moderatism, the propensity for listening and mediation, the Catholic faith as a reference point for personal action, but also the solid Europeanism of the Popular tradition rooted in De Gasperi, Adenauer and Schuman. With the crusader shield on his chest, he became a municipal councillor in Maglie in 1993 and the following year, after the party's dissolution, he joined Mino Martinazzoli's Ppi. In 1994, however, he was among the supporters, with Rocco Buttiglione, of the choice to ally with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance. With the United Christian Democrats (Cdu) - maintaining excellent relations with Pier Ferdinando Casini's Ccd - he was reconfirmed as a municipal and regional councillor, rising through the ranks with his appointment as vice-president of the region and councillor for tourism in Salvatore Distaso's council.

The path of the centre-right coalition in the Pole for Freedom is in his DNA. In 1998 he said goodbye to the Cdu, opposed to the neo-centrist project of the Udr carried out by Francesco Cossiga, and founded the Cristiani democratici per la libertà together with Roberto Formigoni's group. At the 1999 European elections he was a candidate for the European Parliament on the Forza Italia lists: with 128,637 preferences he was the second of those elected after the Cavaliere. His European adventure was interrupted a year later when he was elected president of Puglia at the age of only thirty, the youngest governor in Republican history supported by the House of Freedom. A circle, even a symbolic one, closes: Fitto gets to sit on his father's bench. Opposite characters - as extrovert Salvatore as introvert Raffaele - but same approach. 'Concreteness combined with planning,' he would say in one of his rare interviews.

Five years later he tried again, but did not make it: he was defeated by Nichi Vendola of Rifondazione Comunista, supported by the centre-left, and remained leader of the opposition in the regional council until June 2006, when he entered the Italian Parliament for the first time as a Forza Italia deputy, of which he was coordinator in Puglia from 2005 to 2009 and coordinator for southern Italy from 2006. These are the years in which the Bari public prosecutor's office opens a file on corruption, from which will result in a judicial via crucis that will only end in 2017 with a full acquittal in Cassation. They are also the years in which he is referred to as Berlusconi's 'dauphin', who calls him a 'thoroughbred'. First he appointed him responsible for relations with other parties and then, in 2008, after his re-election to Montecitorio, he called him into his fourth government as Minister for Regional Affairs. In that team he forged the partnership that was to prove crucial and long-lasting: that with Giorgia Meloni, then Minister for Youth. Golden boy and golden girl.

After his defeat in the 2010 Puglia regional elections, he resigned as minister, but the government rejected his resignation. In the summer, he was added to the delegation for Regional Affairs with that for Territorial Cohesion, heading the Department for Development and Economic Cohesion. In 2013 he was confirmed as an MP and in November, with the end of the Pdl, he officially joined Forza Italia in whose lists he was nominated and re-elected at the European elections in April 2014 as the chief candidate for southern Italy. He left his seat in Montecitorio to move back to Strasbourg. But the friction with the Cavaliere increased: Fitto did not share the path of the Patto del Nazareno, collided with his 'magic circle' and founded the Recostruttori current. In the spring of 2015 came his farewell to Fi and joining the Ecr group of European Conservatives and Reformists, where the British Conservatives also sit. In 2017 in Italy, Fitto became president of the Conservatives and Reformists, which merged into Direzione Italia, joining the Misto in the Chamber and the Gal in the Senate. At the end of the year, with a view to the 2018 political elections, with Maurizio Lupi, Enrico Costa, Saverio Romano, Enrico Zanetti and Flavio Tosi, Noi con l'Italia was born, which made a pact with Lorenzo Cesa's Udc to propose itself as the fourth leg of the centre-right coalition. It will not be a success.