Correction and clarification: the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Consumer Affairs, Ms Emma Bonino, is not a candidate for the Italian presidency.
And she is not a candidate. In fact, according to her spokesman, she is a "non-candidate".
This extraordinary, dare one say metaphysical, notion of a virtual candidacy is Ms Bonino's explanation why her declared willingness to be appointed president of her country is not in conflict with the new code of conduct for commissioners agreed last week and published yesterday.
The code explicitly forbids commissioners from standing for elected office in the member-states and from political involvement except at grass-roots level in their parties.
Ms Bonino's spokesman, Mr Pietro Pietrucci, explained to a bewildered press room that Ms Bonino's candidacy was not a real candidacy because it was "purely symbolic". The Italian president is elected jointly by both houses of parliament, he explained, by means of a procedure that does not allow for candidates or nominations. A name simply emerges from the ballot of members.
If there are no candidates, then Ms Bonino has not offended against the code. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Ms Bonino's intention is not to get elected, he argued, but to show up the lack of transparency of the system and make the case for a direct popular mandate for the presidency. Indeed her name had emerged from a process in which she had no part, he said, but she was willing to lend it to add weight to a noble cause. So posters of "Emma for president" appear all over Italy.
Ms Bonino is a fiery, charming, chain-smoking champion of causes ranging from abortion rights in Italy to the liberation of Afghani women and the decriminalisation of cannabis. She was nominated to the Commission by the then Italian prime minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, who at that stage depended on her party, the Radicals, for his parliamentary majority. The Radical party, a "non-party" if ever such a thing existed, is little more than a group of iconoclastic individuals who take pride in cocking a snook at the mainstream parties - at one stage in the 1970s they successfully added the porn star "La Cicciolina" to their parliamentary slate.
