It is only a matter of survival
A country that falls through the wall of 40 percent youth unemployment, which is fined by the EU for the lack of investment in drinking water purification, should have a political class committed to explaining to the citizens the causes of these failures, so they can understand how to solve them.
All the way around, the political class is focused only in its own survival, the survival of a political class minced by infighting on each side, both government and opposition.
Generations are left in the circle of subsistence. Families are about to receive new increases in water bills (after the increases of electricity and gas, while there are rumors of further cuts in public spending) while in that separate world, the politicians hold forth the election date, the motivations of the election, the majority premium and the blocked list leaders. Above all, marking a stellar distance between what is happening in the psycho Trump’s America and the issues of our coast hugging party government system.
The show that the chaos in the Democratic Party (and the deployment of the deceased center-left) is offering to the fans of the genre is remarkable, as much as the reaction of hostility that such a political landscape can legitimately raise in our society, affected by such a progressive and pervasive setback.
We are witnessing a meltdown of the party that holds the government, in a head-on collision among the first men of the political class that originates precisely in the massive popular protest, as occurred with the deadly beat of the referendum. Renzi was overwhelmed and his mad craving for revenge leads him to the bet on final disintegration.
The large group of Renzi’s orphans, those who greeted him as the young promise of the Italian left and today depict him as a scoundrel of the worst kind, is joined by the former head of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano, the lord protector of the dismantler, the putative father of Renzi’s reforms.
While he abandons the former prime minister to his fate, at least Napolitano keeps some consistency in judging the race to early voting impractical (“in civilized countries, elections are held at the end of the term”). He is opposed to it today as back then, when, rather than facing the verdict of the polls facing the 2011 crisis, he appointed Mario Monti as life senator, blessed Letta and concluded the ominous parable baptizing Florence mayor as a world leader.
The waiting room of the upcoming sun (Bersani’s Olivo, D’Alema’s plank, the congress of the former Sel Vendola and the Pd’s fired representatives) is likely to leave only room for standing up. The division syndrome, that is apparently affecting the Italian Left on the eve of the conference that was supposed to celebrate its creation as the new alternative party, is a bad signal.
Right in the moment of the greatest crisis of the Democratic Party, Italian Left seems to lose the compass. And rather than going to a congress confrontation with so much wood in the fire, rather than competing in an environment where social expectations would claim a large, programmatic, credible and engaging left, as happened in the families of democratic European socialist tradition, it finds himself talking again about cards and leadership. All are waiting for Renzi to provide them, sooner or later, with the alibi of the division or the landing of a faded rainbow.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/e-soltanto-questione-di-sopravvivenza/ on 2017-02-02