ROME – Mattarella bis. At the eighth voting for the election of the Head of State, the parties decided to converge on the outgoing President who was then reconfirmed in the role that has seen him protagonist over the past seven years. 

His re-election took place before the end of the counting of the ballots, having reached the necessary majority (505 votes out of 1.009) with less than seven hundred ballots scrutinized.

That it was going in that direction, it was already understood by the last votes: in the absence of shared candidates, the name of Sergio Mattarella was the most “popular”, transversely.

The decision to converge on the outgoing President came today, after a morning of meetings and consultations between the leaders, the premier and the Head of State himself who would have received several phone calls from parties’ secretaries while he was in his new home in Rome, where he had just moved after seven years in Quirinale as Head of State.

The trait d’union was Prime Minister Mario Draghi who, after a talk with Mattarella on the sidelines of the swearing-in ceremony of the new judge of the Constitutional Court, Filippo Patroni Griffi, heard from the various political leaders. “It is appropriate that Mattarella remain at the Colle (the Quirinal hill, seat of the Presidency of the Italian Republic), for the good and stability of the country,” said the premier.

And after a summit of the majority parties, the announcement of the agreement arrived to ask Mattarella to stay. The group leaders “exposed the situation” to the outgoing President, “begging him” to make a second term, as reported by Senator Julia Unterberger of the group ‘Per le Autonomie’, after the meeting at the Quirinale between the group leaders of the majority political forces and the Head of State. The President, explained Unterberger, “did not hide the fact that he would have other plans, thanked for the esteem and said that if there is a need to lend a hand, he is there”.

Mattarella’s re-election was also welcomed with great satisfaction in the Vatican. “It seemed very clear to me from the beginning that there were so many and such tensions, between forward and stop escapes, that frankly this appeared to be the only solution to get out of it”, said Father Antonio Spadaro, director of Civiltà Cattolica is the Pope’s ‘spin doctor’, who spoke of a “Mattarella-Draghi tandem” that succeeded “in the almost impossible undertaking of mediation between political forces and of guaranteeing international credibility”.

In the photo (from https://www.quirinale.it), the President Sergio Mattarella with the President of the Senate Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati and the President of the Chamber of Deputies Roberto Fico, stmania, at the end of the swearing-in ceremony of the new judge of the Constitutional Court, Filippo Patroni Griffi