Let’s face it: it is not stuff as a budget law. It is not the PNRR, it is not the Superbonus enemmed the European rearmament plan or the reform of justice. But it’s up to an uncovered nerve, on the contrary, two. Family and identity. Name and blood. Senator Dario Franceschini, one who never moves at random, threw a proposal there during the assembly of the Democratic Party. Of those that seem a boutade from after dinner, and instead they open Pandora’s vase: why not give children, by law, only the surname of the mother? Bum!
Simple, he said. Linear, almost elegant. “Compensation for secular injustice”. A way to break that invisible and stubborn chain that has always nailed their children to the father. To man. As if to say: for once, we overturn the table, we honor the mothers. After millennia of often mastery surnames, let’s try the opposite. The proposal was born (and immediately stumbled) in the regulatory vacuum left by the Constitutional Court, which in 2022 removed the obligation of the paternal surname, without however replacing it with a clear model.
And so, in the chaos of “everyone does as they want”, Franceschini tries to dictate a line. Except that in the Democratic Party they do not agree. Imagine. Yes, because if someone applauded – Laura Boldrini calls it “a street”, Valeria Valente speaks of “battle of civilization” – in other corridors dissentee. Stefano Lepri, for example, is not there: «It is not just patriarchate. The father’s surname is also a form of responsibility ». And it is not even said that for a woman emancipation it means simply to arrive or possess what a man belongs, militarily occupying the male universe. Why putting limits to the other half of the sky, which then good to see is as large as infinity? Women know how to do “as” but also “more” than men. Meditate people, meditate.
But the real show is staged outside the Nazarene. Matteo Salvini triggers like a spring: «Here is the great priority of the left! Take away from children the father’s surname! ». Simone Pillon echoes him, dusting off the vocabulary of the offended right: “genius against patriarchate”, “provocation”. Federico Mollicone (Fdi) throws it on cosmic balance: “From patriarchy to matriarchy”. In short, from the omelette to its reverse.
Not even Forza Italia remains to look. Senator Zanettin, with a grimace of endurance, liquidates everything as “a gimmick as a media stage”. Yet the point remains there, in the middle of the room, like a upside -down dining table. Franceschini dared to touch a totem: the family name. Which is not just registry, it is culture. He is possession, but also responsibilities from “good father of the family”, as we read in the books of jurisprudence. It is a certain idea of continuity that, from what world it is world, has always been written to male. But be careful. Because the warning of jurists also arrives. Cesare Mirabelli, former president of the Constitutional Court, warns: the maternal surname imposed by law also risks ending up in the mince of inconstitutionalities, starting with article 3. In other words, if the problem was the obligatory choice, even the reversal risks being authoritarian.
So what? Then we are entangled between the law and common sense, between the desire for equality and the need for identity. Franceschini sparked the cards. But for now, the deck is back on the ground.
