Lunch at the Chamber with Conte, Bonelli and Fratoianni

There was a time when all the leaders of the broad camp were at the table, with smiling faces from the post on social media. It was June. Then the meetings continued, but without photos and mostly without the entire team: a few days ago a face-to-face meeting between the president of the M5s Giuseppe Conte and the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein.

Last was a lunch in the Chamber, on the eve of the final vote on the electoral law, with an even different lineup: Conte and the leaders of Avs, Angelo Bonelli and Nicola Fratoianni. Schlein did not, even though she had been in Montecitorio in the morning. A few days after the Pd secretary's warning to the allies, "One is not worth one, we have double the votes", that meeting without her sounded a bit like an answer. Also because M5s and Avs have similar positions, and different from those of the Democratic Party, on various points. They ask for a stop to the sending of weapons to Ukraine and would gladly do without an agreement with Renzi. In short: the Democratic Party has double the votes, but the M5s and Avs can crowd together at the program table. Without considering that the passage of the primaries has to be defined and Avs - which does not want them - has not yet decided how it will face them, whether with its own candidate or who knows by supporting whom. At the end of the meeting, evasive answers. "We didn't talk about politics," Conte tried to dribble away. Will there be a table with Schlein too? "Of course - he replied - there will be a meeting on the programme". Fratoianni and Bonelli explained that that lunch was not planned. During the day there was a vote of confidence and therefore maximum turnout in the Chamber. Bonelli and Conte met on the Transatlantic, talked for a while on the seats and then headed together to the Montecitorio restaurant. On the plates: lentil soup. At that point, Bonelli called Fratoianni, who had already had lunch. An hour and a half of threesome meeting. There was time to talk. In the end, no one wanted to cause controversy or pull the strings. Both in Avs and in the M5s: "They talked about the opposition's vote on the electoral law", reported the staff. Water on the fire also among the generals of the Democratic Party: "It is normal for the allied parties to talk to each other.

And then the secretary had a very cold reaction, she should be concerned about her speech in the Chamber on trust." Among the PD troops, however, the mood was less Gandhian: they didn't like that lunch without the leader of the main opposition party, it was seen as an insult. Senator Filippo Sensi, from the reformist minority of the Democratic Party, did not like it: "The problem is not the leaders, the point is whether the leaders correspond to a base - he said - It will not be a game of chairs that will provide us with a convincing program and a government profile. Let's get a move on". Here's another theme. Avs and M5s also ask to speed up. In the Democratic Party they say they are ready, but show less concern.

The reasoning is simple: even if we go to vote in May, there are still almost nine months left. There is time and we don't start from scratch. There is the belief that the storms will become less and less violent, that the knots will slowly untie. As happened in the regionals. Meanwhile, the approval of the electoral law is upon us. If there is the green light, the primaries will be practically mandatory. A first, fundamental, fixed point.