02/05/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 02/05/2021 6:00 AM
Benito Mussolini is still alive in Italy 75 years after his murder at the hands of partisans.
Much more alive than imaginable by a reality that puzzles and overwhelms intellectuals or politicians and loads ordinary people with frustrations.
The validity of that spectrum is a dangerous setback for democracy
.
But the current crisis, which brought down another Italian government at the worst moment of the pandemic, the disaster of the economy and unemployment, reveals an exhausted system.
If the Italians raised their heads they would see above them a herd of politicians fighting for the plunder of the multimillion-dollar European rescue funds, without looking down, without listening to the pained murmur of the people, without caring about their drama.
The problem is the snake eggs that nest those egoisms.
Antonio Scurati, a philosopher from Naples and award-winning writer, published last year
M. Il figlio del secolo
, a fictionalized biography of Mussolini's rise to power from the point of view of the executioners, as summarized years ago by El's correspondent. Country in Rome, Daniel Verdú.
But what impacts the most is the current look reflected in that mirror.
“The strongest analogy - Scurati says -
is in the feeling of defeat, discomfort, abandonment, disappointment,
rejection and rejection of the old ruling class and parliamentary institutions.
Also the failure of social democracy from 1919 to 1921, a scenario in which fascism found fertile ground ”.
"This type of anti-political sentiment, which has nothing to do with the rational analysis of our life,"
he
adds,
is again detected
, as then, in high percentages of the electorate.
It affects parents, workers, people of good attracted by leaders and movements that openly show contempt for the old politics, but also parliamentary institutions.
Let's clarify that these reflections were formulated almost two years ago, long before the pandemic broke out and turned everything on its head even more seriously.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing Liga.
Photo EFE
What happens in Italy?
The country has been governed at the current stage
by an alliance, first against nature
, between the Social Democracy of the Democratic Party, the anti-system experiment of the 5-Star movement of the comedian Beppe Grillo and the Northern League of the far-right Matteo Salvini, a leader who raises the hand like the legendary character from Scurati's biography.
That gathering, motivated less by conviction than need, lasted until Salvini kicked the board and sought to bring the alliance to collapse to become premier.
It did not succeed.
A few months later, the pandemic arrived and this leader, a deep admirer of Donald Trump,
withdrew
as happened to almost all the sovereignist populist forces overwhelmed by the need for a serious response that they lacked to the challenge of the disease.
The structure was rearmed with an agreement between the PD and the Grillo movement, which has formidable parliamentary support in both chambers.
The man of the unit was the now fallen premier, Giuseppe Conte, a politician linked to grillismo but distant from the inmates and without history, whose figure grew up in the fight against the disease.
That alliance, actually anti-Salvini, is the one that just fell apart, at the worst moment.
It was disintegrated by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi,
who broke with the PD and assembled a small party
with a small group of loyal legislators, enough to destabilize the government.
The reasons
The reason for the fight?
The handling of the multimillion-dollar funds of 209 billion euros
provided by the European Union for the rescue of Italy, which for the most part will not be returned and what if they do, they will do so with a negligible interest rate.
Italy, the third largest economy in the eurozone, is in a swamp.
It suffered one of the worst drops in GDP in the block, -8.9%.
Although it achieved some improvement in the third quarter, it sank again in the fourth due to the regrowth.
Hence, unemployment is around 9% or even worse 30% if you see the segment of young people up to 24 years old.
Renzi, reasonably, was crucified by the world press
by overturning a government in the midst of a crisis
unprecedented since World War II.
His maneuver, moreover, hung Italy on the possibility of advancing elections that this time, according to all the polls, would bring Salvini to power, accompanied by the even more fascist Fratelli d'Italia by Giorgia Meloni and Forza Italia by Silvio Berlusconi.
For Brussels, which promoted the bailouts with much greater criteria and less demand for austerity than in the previous crisis of 2008, that this money goes to the hands of angry populists, who embraced Brexit and conspired to destroy European unity, is the nightmare perfect.
Giuseppe Conte, the disgraced premier.
Photo EFE
To avoid an early election with that outcome, the Italian establishment, which is expressed in its political leadership, removed from the galley a figure who had long been a number one, the former president of the European Bank, Mario Draghi.
This open-headed economist
has the prestige of having saved the euro after the 2008 crisis
with the same logic of injections of public money that I carried out in Ben Bernanke I carried out at that time in the United States from the helm of the Federal Reserve.
It is that with a certain irony it is defined as "the visible hand of the state", by that other invisible one of Adam Smith's metaphor.
This visible hand is the same that is applied now to face the pandemic in Europe and the US, public money to rescue economies from the top down.
It is presumable that Renzi and those who motivated him to launch the destabilizing offensive that ended the Conte legislature were looking for precisely this way out.
The quite clear intention has been that the aid funds of Brussels
do not remain in the hands
of a political sector like Five Stars whose electoral base is small and medium-sized companies and independent workers.
For many analysts, this shift defends the priority of large corporations.
And Draghi, a pragmatist at the end of the day, somehow ensures that the handover of power is a change of course without extremism that was not coincidentally
widely celebrated by the markets
.
What is not clear, in Italy above all, is whether this result is guaranteed and whether the dynamics of the process that collapsed Conte's legislature will continue to erode the system.
In the meantime, the initiative to bring the legendary Italian banker to the government will surely have the support of the Democratic Party and Renzi's tiny political group, which, by the way, would disappear from the political map if there are early elections.
But this novelty is a castor syrup for the Grillo movement that is sending out signals of this disagreement.
However, everything is shaped like an alley
.
The 5 Stars exhibit great parliamentary strength, but little real political representation.
If there are elections, that contradiction would be whitened and the movement would lose enormous quotas of power with which it will be able, for now, to interact with Draghi.
Salvini himself is locked in that labyrinth.
He has fought against the European Union but could not resign the help of Brussels.
Comparisons
The comparison is interesting.
His Spanish allies of the far-right group Vox have just embraced the social democratic government of Pedro Sánchez and his supposedly leftist partner Podemos, for a crucial vote
on European funds
that would have also led the legislature of that country into the abyss.
Of course that of Italy is much more strident, especially since history.
This new executive, if approved, will constitute the number 69 since the end of World War II, which on average implies a new government every 13 months.
Analysts have tried to decipher that chronic instability.
An alternative would be the series of coalitions that Christian democracy was generating in the middle of the Cold War to stop the coming to power of the Communist party, the largest in Europe and which ended up generating a style of doing politics.
The Economist magazine that notes this flaw, nevertheless believes that other condiments of the crazy Italian reality is the willingness of legislators to freely move from one party to the other in spite of the vote that brought them to those seats.
"Of the 945 deputies and senators elected in the last general election, 147 had changed parties at the end of 2020."
These vile and opportunistic ways explain why the ghost of Mussolini wanders among the hiding places of this drama.
Copiright Clarín 2021
Look also
The economist Mario Draghi agreed to form a government in Italy, but the political crisis remains open
Faced with the gigantic crisis, the European Union turns 180 degrees in its economic policy