Francesco Saverio Garofani, born in 1962, has always been one of the men closest to Sergio Mattarella, advisor to the head of state for the affairs of the Supreme Defense Council. According to La Verità and its director Maurizio Belpietro, he would be among those who at the Quirinale “are agitated in the hope of tripping the prime minister” and at a dinner he would have invoked “a providential jolt” to unseat Giorgia Meloni.
Romano, involved in the youth groups of the Christian Democrats and graduated in Literature and Philosophy, is a professional journalist and has walked alongside Mattarella in journalistic and political experiences, from the DC (always in the left wing of the party) to the PPI up to the Margherita and finally to the PD. For two years, from 1990 to 1992, he was chief editor of La Discussione, from 1995 to 2003, director of the newspaper Il Popolo, in 2003 among the founders of Europa, of which he became deputy director: always close to Mattarella in carrying forward the political tradition of democratic Catholicism in newspapers first of the DC and then of the centrist ones. From the PPI he moved to the Margherita and was elected to the Chamber for the first time in 2006 with the Ulivo, only to be confirmed in Montecitorio in the two subsequent legislatures. From 2015 to 2018 he was president of the Defense Committee of the Chamber. He was a member of the national leadership of the Democratic Party. He has written two books on Aldo Moro and has been Mattarella’s advisor at the Quirinale since 2018 for institutional matters. After his last appointment, in 2022, as advisor for Affairs of the Supreme Defense Council, FdI communicated its “surprise at the decision to appoint such a politicized and biased figure as a former parliamentarian of the Democratic Party, for a role that for the first time is not entrusted to a military man”.