“Today‘today, it is before everyone’s eyes that power has become mafia’: these are the first words of Roberto Scarpinato at the start of our interview in one of the courtrooms of the Paris judicial court. I had just reminded him that in 2011, in The Last of the Judgeshe had announced a “mafiosisation du monde”emphasizing that “The mafia method is not simply a criminal reality: it also constitutes an ancient way of exercising power, using a deadly cocktail of legal and illegal power.”.
Immediately evoking Donald Trump and Benyamin Netanyahu, their radical negation of international law and the absence of limits to their desire for power, Roberto Scarpinato then explains how, from his observation post as a prosecutor specializing in the fight against mafia crime, he saw the traditional mafia transform, become more notable and become institutionalized, corrupting the heart of the economic system: “Mafia capitalism has become a structural component of capitalism itself.”
Senator of the Italian Republic for the Five Star Movement, after having had to retire from the judiciary in 2022, Roberto Scarpinato defines himself as “Un patriote de la loi”. “If the law is not the same for everyone, there is no democracy.”he sums up simply, recounting how he continues his anti-mafia fight in the parliamentary enclosure, speaking “the language of the statesman” facing representatives of the power in place whom he knows to be corrupt. Living under permanent police escort, this Sicilian describes his life as “A war journey”determined by the need to choose sides, between oppressed and oppressors, assassins and victims.
After the assassinations of his colleagues Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, he took over from them, managing to confuse the “haute mafia” up to the highest spheres of Italian politics and ending his career as public prosecutor of Palermo. This fight continues today against Giorgia Meloni, the far-right president of the Council of Ministers, whose rise began under the sponsorship of Silvio Berlusconi. Roberto Scarpinato describes the importance of the recent battle to lose the referendum which wanted to put an end to the independence of the Italian judiciary.
Beyond his universal alarm, which illuminates the subject of his remarkable essay on power and criminality, The Return of the Princethis interview is an opportunity to send a message to French politics. Indeed, Roberto Scarpinato’s professional commitment would not have been possible without the Constitution of the Italian Republic, promulgated on December 27, 1947, which established true independence of the judiciary: public prosecutors do not depend on the executive power, but belong to the same body as the magistrates of the seat, and the judicial police carry out their investigations under their sole control.
Unless it violates the Constitution, political power cannot in any way interfere in the work of the judiciary, which can thus freely investigate without reporting to it. For Roberto Scarpinato, the French situation, in which the prosecution depends on the executive power, is from this point of view a democratic anomaly which harms the smooth running of justice and, above all, hinders its investigations into high crime, at the crossroads of political worlds and economic circles. “We should give the French judiciary, he recommends, les mêmes garanties que la Constitution italienne offre à sa magistrate. »
