Valditara, the new Minister of Education and Merit is Gelmini pro-reform

Valditara

Giuseppe Valditara, for thirty years in politics with the right, rapporteur in the Senate of the Gelmini reform and signatory of an appeal by Catholic jurists against civil unions, was chosen to lead the new Ministry of Education and Merit for the Meloni government . Professor of Roman public and private law at the University of Turin, he has been the political advisor of the Northern League leader Matteo Salvini since September 2022.

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The political career

Presented to the public as one of the names " technicians ”of the new executive, Valditara is actually an extremely political name. In 1993 he joined Gianfranco Miglio's Salvadori Foundation, then defined as "the ideologue of the Northern League", who was working on a project to reform the state in a federalist sense. Twenty years later he became the staff coordinator who was responsible for drawing up the League's program for the 2013 political elections, when the League took 4%. He entered Parliament for the first time in 2001, and was elected to the Senate from the ranks of the National Alliance (AN). Later merged into the People of Freedom, he followed Gianfranco in the split that led to the birth of the Future and Freedom for Italy.

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Rapporteur of the Gelmini reform

He began to deal with education during his parliamentary career, becoming the speaker in the Senate of the so-called Gelmini reform (from the surname of the former school minister Mariastella Gelmini), cause of 10 billion in cuts to the school and university budget, of which 8.5 billion to education alone and the rest to universities, as reported by several studies by the European Commission.

The money stolen from the education sector by the reform, divided between laws numbers 133, 169 and 240, they were used to "save" Alitalia from the takeover by Air France. Useless bailout, given that the national airline almost immediately found itself at a loss again, and then entered a financial crisis in 2017, definitively ceasing its activities in 2021 and being bought by Ita airways. In the meantime, the reform cuts have taken away from the Italian education system 10 thousand classes, 90 thousand chairs, 30 thousand substitutes and 44 thousand places for non-teaching staff. While on the university front he brought funding below the European average, halving the resources allocated to services for students and female students.

Alfredo Mantovano, the new undersecretary to the presidency of the Council, is also against conservative abortion and Christian extremist , has sided several times against Law 194 and civil rights. He has already been part of the first, second and fourth Berlusconi governments

The praise of pro-life associations

For obvious reasons, the appointment of Valditara as head of the new Ministry of Education and Merit - defined concept as a "perverse mechanism" by the political philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel, in his book The Tyranny of Merit - was not welcomed by the world of schools and universities. While it was celebrated by the Catholic fundamentalists of the Pro Vita e Famiglia association, who see in him a "profile that gives hope" to those who "oppose the spread of gender ideology in schools". The fundamentalists also see as "encouraging" his close relationship with Salvini and his closeness to the Catholic world, which led him to sign, in 2016, an appeal against civil unions, the institution of public law that he granted to couples homosexuals to be able to enjoy most of the rights and obligations granted to married heterosexual couples.

Government ministers by Giorgia Meloni Gallery 26 Images by Kevin Carboni

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L Roman empire destroyed by immigrants

In addition to his passion for cuts in education and his opposition to the extension of civil rights to the lgbtq + community, he also expressed himself antagonistically to migration, writing the book L Roman Empire destroyed by immigrants, for the right-wing newspaper Il Giornale. In the text, whose title was pushed by the director Alessandro Sallusti, Valditara argues that "migratory flows have caused the most important state of antiquity to collapse", as we read in the subtitle of the publication.

The book it was criticized as an "instrumental modernization" of Roman migration policies by Giusto Traina, professor of Roman history at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In his book The special story, because we cannot do without the ancient Romans, Traina underlines the "politically instrumental" aspects of Valditara's interpretations, comparing the picture proposed by the new minister to the principle of immigration choisie, immigration selected only to people with "certain credentials", which in France was one of the strengths of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential program. "And patience if its possible application" could oppose "the system of free movement of the European Union" concludes Traina, specifying how "where the opposition of selective immigration to the one suffered is an effective slogan on a political level, political realities and economic ones follow different paths ".

At the Ansa the minister then said: "As always happens when a newspaper publishes a book as an attachment, it is the publisher who chooses the title to make the work more captivating. Mine is, however, a pamphlet which recognizes the historical value of migrations that must nevertheless be governed and not undergone. We are sorry that with a scarce scientific method we limit ourselves to reading the titles to express judgments, without having read the contents ".