editorial
NoonSeptember 27, 2022 – 07:55 am
from Enzo d’Errico
Napoli a yellow island lost in the sea of blue that covers almost the whole country. And on this island the Fort of the Five Stars resists all winds. It matters little whether they blow from the right or from the left: the building holds up, even well. Like it or not, last Sunday’s elections make the Vesuvius province a national case: in the rest of Italy the clear, unequivocal affirmation of the center-right, while here it settles on more ordinary figures, although registering substantial increases. Nothing, however, that can stem the triumph of Giuseppe Conte, a success made even more plastic by the collapse of Luigi Di Maio who, in his college, is largely overtaken by former party colleague Sergio Costa and thrown out of Parliament. But that’s not enough. The candidate of the Movement also tears up Mara Carfagna, head of the Mezzogiorno in the Draghi government, who has been moved to the ranks of Action-Italia Viva.
Result: a former minister, alone, beats two ministers still in office. Attention, this is the most sensational case because we could also tell about the unknown Ada Lopreiato, a lawyer employed in politics for the first time, who defeats two big names of the caliber of Valeria Valente (center-left, president of the parliamentary commission on femicides) and Stefano Caldoro ( center-right, former minister in the Berlusconi governments and former governor of Campania). In short, the stories are many. Too many to be liquidated with the easy explanation of a metropolis withdrawn into itself in defense of citizenship income. There is something that goes beyond, much deeper than a financial measure that has remained incomplete, with no effect on active labor policies, without the necessary control mechanisms, which has become exclusively welfareist, but which has still stemmed an otherwise devastating social crisis. . At least this was a response to the growing inequalities in the whole of the South, to the impoverishment of the middle classes that the reformist left only pretended to see and never really assimilated, convinced by now that the world begins and ends in the living rooms of the neighborhoods. well.
I can be wrong, for I do not remember a single party that has elaborated a different proposal, capable of converting the alleged alms into a productive path: for better or worse, in more or less nuanced forms, they all came to defend it, smelling the comeback of the Five Stars in the South. Bagnoli reiterated his intention to cancel the income, undoubtedly paying a toll in terms of votes. The truth is that Conte, thanks also to a skilful electoral marketing operation, has been able to give a political symbol to which a piece of Italy, which is already sinking both feet in the next social emergency, is clinging. And, as a further addiction to victory, he managed to attract substantial fringes of the left orphan of a Pd in disarray. What did the others offer to those who don’t live between Chiaia and Posillipo? Little, very little: perhaps only the flashes of enlightenment contained in the program of the Third Pole – chapters however indigestible for those who struggle to put together lunch and dinner – and the understandable enthusiasm of the Brothers of Italy. Moreover, we have been denouncing the fact that politics has disappeared here more than elsewhere: even the municipal administration, led by Gaetano Manfredi, after a year of life resembles a committee of experts (overwhelmingly university professors) living in a a world of its own, a technocratic reassembly that has not instilled Naples with that indispensable dialogue to create an identification between citizens and institutions. The abnormal abstention (in the city we are at 50%) suggests a sign of reaction or is it aimed at banally liquidating it with the excuse of the storm at the end of summer? In short, only by observing the general scene can we grasp the ingredients of the winning recipe by M5S. simple: disorientation pushes you to seek shelter in the places you already know, to keep what you own and risk losing, to appreciate whoever (or seems to) listen to you.
Do we want to call it populism? Agree. But what was the alternative on the electoral market? The bad result of the Democratic Party represents the logical consequence of a perhaps irremediable political decline. I could dwell on the party of the Ztl, on the substantial indifference towards old and new dynamics of the world of work, on the social autism of a force crouched in the living rooms and absent from the streets, on the self-preservation of management groups dedicated exclusively to ensuring their own survival (also economic), but I prefer to focus on his strategy in the South. Enrico Letta, even knowing he was facing a defeat, chose to make an agreement with Vincenzo De Luca – giving him a significant part of the Campania colleges – instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to give a signal of discontinuity with the autocratic methods of the governor. The outcome of this pact is now under everyone’s eyes: De Luca takes home the election of his son Piero, the only thing that really interested him, after putting him in the warmth of the proportional lists. The rest of the competition, for the Democrats, takes the shape of a catastrophe. The governor collects a resounding blow in his Salerno, conquered by the right hand of Edmondo Cirielli, a historic opponent, and among many he leaves on the field Fulvio Bonavitacola, vice president of the Region, and Luca Cascone, one of his closest collaborators at Palazzo Santa Lucia. Even the Five Stars give him a slap in the family countryside by winning a seat.
Those who know the stories of the Campanian Democratic Party are well aware that De Luca brings hay only to himself, because the (increasingly less) consensus he has is based on the donation of public resources with private criteria. How could Letta have imagined that, on the contrary, he would provide him with a pool of opinion votes that he never had, except at the beginning of the pandemic? It is plausible that Sunday’s defeat announces the governor’s political requiem, the farewell to dreams of a third term or family succession. However, the glaring mistake made by the national and local leadership of the Democratic Party clearly shows the self-referentiality and conservatism of a party that voters, rightly or wrongly, consider more like a power bloc than a political organization. It seems clear that the path of the reformists is all uphill and the summit is very far away. But, since democracy is not an option, a new season begins that the free press and all information will have to follow with extreme attention and, in the same way, without any prejudice. The Corriere del Mezzogiorno do its part as, I believe, it has always done in recent years. It is not a sad day for Italy, as Enrico Letta and Debora Serracchiani affirmed, because the parliamentary majority is the result of a democratic vote, not an abuse of power. It would be enough to start from here to restore its place to politics.
September 27, 2022 | 07:55
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