In the end, in Milan, the match will be played between two managers: Giuseppe Sala for the centre-left and Stefano Parisi for the centre-right. According to some, politics would emerge humiliated. Actually the opposite is true. If the word manager is replaced by the word competent, or capable of managing complex situations, one immediately realizes that politics, understood as the ability to understand society's problems and find ways to solve them, can only come out with an advantage.
After all, these are two people who have both demonstrated the ability to manage complex situations at a certain level and who now aspire to do the same thing at a higher level, which does not simply concern a company, but an entire city. . It is a question of ambition and in these cases, as Antonio Gramsci noted, the greater the ambition, in the sense of the importance of the things one wants to deal with, the better. After that, politics is skill and culture and it is here that one sees whether ambition matches merit.
In the case of Giuseppe Sala, I would say that this proof has already been given on at least two very important occasions. The first is naturally that of Expo. Only those who don't know what it was can argue that it was manager stuff. In reality, Sala not only had the (huge) task of building the site, but he had to deal with three different governments, two mayors and two regional governors. With international embassies, consulates and chancelleries. He had to make drastic decisions on the very nature of the event, overcoming resistance of all kinds and having to build the necessary consensus on his own in an original relationship with intellectuals, trade unions, NGOs, etc. It is certain that, in his place, any manager, lacking the necessary ambition, tenacity and, it should be added, personal disinterest, would have screwed everything up. Hall no.
The second occasion is of course his victory in the centre-left primaries. Clear victory obtained on unknown and largely biased terrain, when not openly hostile. Yet he did it, moving with great humility but also with great authority and, above all, fair play. Exactly the three qualities that make him today the only candidate capable of preventing the center-left from dividing itself, as well as making it win.
Today, Milan's primary need, as Piero Bassetti authoritatively said, is to “transform the large amount of steam emitted by Expo into pure energy”. On this plain Sala has no rivals.
