On the substantial rejection, including abstentions and votes against, that he received the new European Stability Pact on the part of Italy in Strasbourg, I feel like I fully subscribe to the irony of Paolo GentiloniEU commissioner for economic affairs: “We have united Italian politics.”
Now, despite the fact that the elections for the renewal of the European Parliament are approaching, which have also pushed Meloni's party to abstain so as not to be overtaken on the right by the League, what emerges is the usual, disheartening picture of a substantially irresponsible country on the level of public accounts. In this sense I quite agree with the analysis presented by Salvatore Merlo during Wednesday's episode of Omnibus, broadcast on La7.
In a nutshell, noting a sort of historical irresponsibility of Italian politics precisely on the financial side, he pointed the finger at the colossal devastation, which still reverberates heavily on the state budget, caused by madness of the super building bonus strongly supported by the 5 Star Movement Giuseppe Conte and, I might add, approved without batting an eyelid by his then associates in the Democratic Party.
However, I feel like adding an element that is often missing in this type of sacrosanct reflections, in which we tend to unload all the responsibility for a condition which, exactly as claimed by Merlo, it is leading us to default exclusively on the political class. In reality, on this level it is important to underline what I was lucky enough to hear on the radio from a political analyst many decades ago, during my adolescence: “The political class does not come from Mars. It is nothing more than an emanation of the social fabric to which it belongs.”
In this sense, in the Theory of Public Choice, developed by Nobel Prize winner James Buchana, the interaction between voters and their representatives is masterfully defined. Interaction that, in a system that inclines towards widespread forms of welfarism and legalized exchange votingalso prevents the most responsible and far-sighted politicians from adopting political strategies based on the balance of public accounts (The electoral triumph of the Grillini in 2018, who had promised sea and mountains erga omnesnor is it the most clear demonstration).
All this, returning to the initial point, tends to make the political class itself homogeneous in terms of financial rigor, unifying it in what we could define as the single party of public spending. Single party that has its roots in time, given that during the so-called First Republic as many as 95% of the spending laws were approved in Parliament with the favorable vote of the Italian Communist Party. Times pass but, apart from the usual, horrible chatter about anti-fascism in the absence of fascismthe country's systemic problems remain in all their inevitable drama.
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