Mattarella turns 84, phone call from Meloni

A birthday with a record: no less than 3,823 days, i.e. 10 years and more than six months at the Quirinale and 84 years well-worn for the Sicilian president. Sergio Mattarella is celebrating his anniversary today without deviating from his work commitments. Only in the evening will he reunite with his family for a dinner with his children and his beloved grandchildren. As usual in the run-up to the summer break, Mattarella is already preparing at the Quirinale the fan speech he will give during the traditional ceremony of the exchange of greetings with the parliamentary press on 30 July. Then the holidays: probably first a few days of decompression at the presidential estate of Castelporziano, then the longest break at Villa Ausserer, in the municipality of Castelrotto, in Alto Adige, a place already chosen in the past by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni telephoned the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to wish him a happy birthday on behalf of herself and the entire government. Meloni emphasised the feelings of deep esteem and gratitude that the Italian institutions and citizens have for the Head of State.

Indeed, it has been a complex year for the president grappling with rising international tensions, from Ukraine to Gaza, to the advent of Donald Trump and the thorny issue - still up in the air - of US tariffs. Not only that, Sergio Mattarella had to deal with a heart problem that led him to a two-day hospitalisation at Rome's Santo Spirito hospital last April. Everything was solved without any problems with the installation of a pacemaker that allowed him to return to work very quickly: since then he seems to be in perfect shape.

Mattarella is the second president to be re-elected to the Colle after Giorgio Napolitano who, however, resigned after two years. Mattarella, on the other hand, has already well over the third year since his re-election in early 2022 after the political forces failed to agree on another personality and name after name was burned in the votes of the joint Parliament. It was a failure of politics that forced him to make himself available again even though, as he himself said several times, he "would have had other plans" for his life. Suffice it to say that his reign has seen as many as six successive governments: Renzi, Gentiloni, Conte I, Conte II, Draghi and Meloni. Beloved by the people - or rather by his fellow citizens, as he likes to say - Mattarella remains an essential point of reference for the country. His equilibrium, calm tones and fatherly figure that has conquered the country's imagination have led him to embody a role as a hinge between politics and citizens, at least somewhat curbing the wind of anti-politics that is dominating not only Italy but the entire world.

Several times this year too, for example in his end-of-year speech, he called for cohesion, for smoothing out the angles of confrontation and for lowering the decibels of political debate, including on the web: 'It is precisely on social networks that too much hatred, too much anger runs, with a tendency to identify adversaries or even enemies. Towards whom,' he emphasised on New Year's Eve, speaking to Italians, 'practising forms of aggression. These are all ways of distracting or aggravating the difficulty of dealing effectively with the daily problems and emergencies of citizens and families: from jobs that are lacking to differences in pay, to inequalities'. An appeal to the good of the Republic that, we are sure, will also be the figure of the coming year in the moral leadership of the country.