It's been two years since Gianni De Michelis he left us. We live in times where even a short period like the one that separates us from May 13, 2019 can become the scene of great changes. Among the many extraordinary events that we have gone through in this period, a more balanced judgment on the so-called First Republic has emerged and strengthened. Today that historical phase is no longer considered, as it has been for years, the sink of all the vices and depravities of politics. The prominent personalities of those times were defined as "registered criminals" by the magistrates (more or less the same ones who today provide highly questionable examples of themselves) to whom an incited public opinion attributed the aura of avenging angels. Then time is a gentleman; the misery of the current political class has ended up re-evaluating - with a more serene judgment capable of recognizing its merits too - that of a recent past, but now distant in the calendar of history.
A posthumous acknowledgment is also reserved for Gianni De Michelis, not only for the works accomplished as a minister (the San Valentino decree of 1984, the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1992, the attempt to reform pensions, etc.), but for his intelligence and expertise. I finish here, with some personal memories. I met Gianni in 1964, when the socialists had to compete with the Psiup in all the organizations that were defined as "mass". I was a student enrolled in the UGI (Italian Goliardic Union, the organization of leftist university students in which Craxi and Pannella also had their first experiences). As a socialist who remained in the Party, after the split, I was invited to participate - as a delegate from Bologna - in a national assembly of ''ugini'' socialist students where the report was carried out by a young Gianni De Michelis. Then when I was working as a trade unionist in Emilia Romagna, I saw him at work as minister of the PPSS, at the Anic in Ravenna, explaining the chemical plan, and I was honestly shocked by his competence because chemistry is a very complex thing (me I realized it when I was elected general secretary of Filcea years later).
As in the plot of a well-known musical comedy from another era: pushing a button kills a mandarin in China. In basic chemistry, more or less the same happened: if an operation was carried out in Marghera, there were repercussions in Sicily, Sardinia and so on. De Michelis ''put everyone in the hole'', sweated seven shirts in the true sense, because they became one after another soaked with sweat. He also developed a reasoning that silenced everyone when he spoke to workers about difficult problems, restructuring and reconversion of production with the inevitable consequences on work and employment. Like all people ''in the know'' it was the incompetence of his interlocutors that bothered him the most.
