In a recent article published on the Bulletin of Italian Politics, I had underlined how the Ten Questions posed by Repubblica to Berlusconi had marked a true landmark in Italian journalism. This claim has been vindicated by the frequency with which this format is being repeated to ask uncomfortable questions to politicians. On Libero, a right-wing newspaper, Filippo Facci asked ten questions to the leader of one of the opposition parties, Antonio di Pietro, while, as we have underlined on this blog, the Daily Mail used it to ask questions to Tony Blair over the War in Iraq. The latest querelle involves (once again) Repubblica. Its founder, Eugenio Scalfari, has asked ten questions to Guido Bertolaso, the head of the Italian civil protection over a number of scandals which emerged in the last few days.

This week, during a meeting organised in Birmingham, it was the turn of Geoff Andrews, from the Open University, who posed ten questions to the Italian opposition. Although these made it to Italy as they were reported on La Repubblica, no answer has yet come from the Secretary of the PD, Pierluigi Bersani. However, Giuseppe “Pippo” Civati, a regional counsellor for Lombardy, one of the most followed Italian bloggers and a rising star of the Democratic Party, decided to answer them on his blog.

It was no surprise to me that these answers came from Civati. I met him a week ago in his office, at the third floor of the building hosting the different political representations in the Lombardy regional council. This is, politically speaking, a rather unhappy place for the Italian left. Lombardy has been a stronghold of the right for the last fifteen years, and Roberto Formigoni, the current governor, is well on track to win his fourth term in office.

In what a depressed loser or a teasing winner would define as an “Indian reserve” of left-leaning thinking in the region, Civati appeared resiliently ambitious. Alternating Milanese dialect to quotations from Habermas, courtesy of his Ph.D. in philosophy, he presented to me a ruthless analysis of the state of his own party. “We should stop behaving as those footballers who want to make it to the World Cup only to sit on the bench - Civati explained - I want us to think that we want to be in politics to score the winning goal in the final”.

When I saw the questions on La Repubblica, I thought of emailing Civati to ask him what he thought about them. I did not do it, as I thought he would be too busy campaigning for the forthcoming elections to address a number of questions posed by a group of foreign academics. He was not and showed willingness to understand the mistakes made in the past and a true desire lo look forward. Civati entitled one of his latest books Nostalgia del Futuro (Nostalgia for the future). His ten answers certainly display such a feeling.