Meloni at Mattarella's, 'harmony but Garofani's words inappropriate'. In the evening Fdi note closes the case

Twenty minutes of talks requested by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella. Twenty minutes of dutiful clarification after yesterday's anomalous back-and-forth between Fdi's House group leader, Galeazzo Bignami, and the Quirinale. But it took another note, this time a joint one from Bignami and the president of the senators Lucio Malan, which arrived in the evening, to reach the end credits of a film that risked escalating into a very serious institutional conflict. 'After the conversation, Fratelli d'Italia considers the matter closed,' put the leaders of Meloni's party on record, 'and does not deem it necessary to add anything else. It is the signal that the Colle was waiting for.

 The background is now well known. On Tuesday, Bignami had called for the denial of an alleged anti-Meloni plan advocated by the Hill's advisor Francesco Saverio Garofani according to an article published by La Verità. A harsh note from the Quirinale replied expressing 'amazement' at having given 'credit to yet another attack on the presidency of the Republic that borders on the ridiculous'. Hours of tension, in which the opposition attacked Fdi and Meloni, evoking the risk of an unprecedented institutional conflict.

No phone call had come from the premier to Mattarella. The powerful and loyal undersecretary Giovanbattista Fazzolari had limited himself to intervening, together with Giovanni Donzelli, to emphasise that Bignami's was not a lunge against the Colle, but a request for denial to a single advisor. This morning, Garofani, a former PD deputy and secretary of the Supreme Defence Council, dismissed the intercepted conversations - which attributed to him the wish for a 'providential shake-up' to end the Meloni era - as 'chatter among friends', saying he was frightened by 'the violence of the attack' and the 'feeling of having been used to strike the president'. Words that inside Fdi were greeted as an admission.

The Meloni-Mattarella face-to-face aimed to tone down tones and avert an unprecedented clash between the Republic's highest institutions. But not everything went according to plan. Not so much for the exchange, which was described as frank but courteous, as for the account circulated at the end by Palazzo Chigi sources. They reiterated the "institutional harmony that exists with the Quirinal, which has never failed since the inauguration of this government and which no one has ever doubted," but also the regret expressed by the Prime Minister to the Head of State for the "institutionally and politically inappropriate words pronounced in a public context" by the advisor.

The same sources justify Bignami's statements of the previous day as the intention, 'on the part of the relative majority party, to intervene to dispel any hypothesis of a clash between two institutions that instead work together for the good of the Nation'. These are not the steps that the Quirinale expected. Meloni would not have explicitly asked for a step back by Garofani. Why, then, insist? Hence the great cold, with the doubt as to whether or not to intervene again with a note. But then from Fratelli d'Italia, with the note from the group leaders, they hoisted the white flag. A new leaf has been turned, tomorrow is another day. The real question now is one: whether there will be any fallout. And which ones.