In the film "The war is over" by Alain Resnais, the screenwriter Jorge Semprun has Diego Mora say that he sets out to go clandestinely to a Madrid under the fascist heel to organize the general strike, knowing full well that it will be a failure and that he will be arrested - that "Patience and irony are the main virtues of revolutionaries". I immediately thought of this as the news reached me death of the beloved Luigi (Gigi) Covatta. She left us at night, suddenly waking up and then closing her eyes serenely as she had lived: how a Righteous, always committed to the "common good", that "good" for him and for those like him was and is politics. Son of the Second Vatican Council, he became, in that extraordinary Milan of the sixties of the twentieth century, a brilliant Entente executive: the organization of the Catholic university students which fed, with the other university student organisations, that nursery of the Italian political class destined to lead the parties of the Republic after the years of the “warm autumn” and the so-called “sixty-eight”.
But Gigi had another formidable political experience when he was a part of that courageous patrol of Catholics led by Livio Labor who, after the decision of the ACLI to abandon the collateralism with the DC, proclaiming the principle of freedom to vote for the ACLI, founded, in 1970, the Workers' Political Movement and the newspaper “Alternativa”.
Together with Gennaro Acquaviva, to whom he was linked throughout his life by a deep bond, Gigi gave birth, starting then, to one of the most interesting experiences not of Catholic dissent, as it is commonly defined, but of Catholic witness in militant politics, without dispersing anything either of the faith in Jesus Christ or of the socialist faith. I think those were the years in which Gigi learned that difficult virtue which is not only of the revolutionary but, even more, of the reformist: the virtue of Patience. It was of this patience, even more heroic than that of the reformist, of which I often spoke with Gigi - I who had shared "that" patience with Diego - and I am sure that even then he assumed that strength which left one admiring when meeting his firm working faith: a strength that could only come from the virtue of Patience.
When the experience of the Workers' Political Movement failed to realize its potential, Gigi, with Gennaro Acquaviva and other companions, joined the Lombard left of the PSI and then it was with Bettino Craxi in the political history that followed from that transformation of the PSI. Gigi always brought his thirst for knowledge and freedom both in his government activity and in that of cultural organizer, trusting in young people and helping them in their struggle and in their choices.
Your reserved and discreet character did not hide the profound empathy with which you confronted everyone. With the Foundation for Socialism, alongside Giuliano Amato and Gennaro Acquaviva, identified that arduous and high ridge of the political struggle which by now had to take place in new conditions after the destruction that began in the XNUMXs of both the political parties and the political society that had given birth to them and that with them he had built the new Republican Italy after the Resistance and the Constitution. An Italy that was based on public and private enterprise, on Parliament, the trade union organizations and the intellectual and cultural agencies that all this world fed and renewed. Gigi was faithful to this original inspiration by hiring the direction of Mondo Operaio: he always remained faithful to it through a thousand efforts but continuous confirmations of the right choice.
A reformist path ("Menshevik" to the end and therefore ungrateful and very hard). The magazine "Mondo Operaio" is one of the last frontiers: perhaps the last one that needed and needs to be built and reconstructed every day in research both on the capitalist transformations underway in Italy and in the world, and on the forms of moral and intellectual resistance, in the expectation that it was necessary and must be prepared to face before the new path of socialism reopens for those who have not lost faith in humanitarian socialism. So Charles Peguy wrote to his readers, with his sarcasm that combined pain with the happiness of testimony, introducing the Thirteenth Notebook of the second series: "C'est peut étre ces situation de désarroi et de dretesse qui nous crée more imperiously que jamais , le devoir de ne pas capituler. Il ne faut jamais capituler…”. It was June 20, 1909. Today we are immersed in a world history that could not be more dramatic. For this reason the example, the Testimony, of Luigi (Gigi) Covatta cannot abandon us. We have to renew that patience of the socialist reformists of today and which renews that of yesterday and which is that of always…
