Italy, as we know, has always oscillated between Great Indignation against politics and repeated phenomena of complicity towards power. It is unlikely that the pendulum of the relationship between people and institutions will stop in a position of equilibrium, favoring, as it should, the exercise of reasoning and, even more so, doubt. Let’s take the case involving Giovanni Toti. Obviously it brought us right back into the chapter of the Great Indignation. And, more usual, the two classic parties were immediately formed: on one side the justicialist one and on the other the guaranteeist one, armed against each other.
In this climate, reasoning, as we said, is almost prohibitive. Yet there are at least two sets of considerations that a mature public opinion should try to address. The first: it is certainly hypocritical to think that politics (whether party or personal) does not have a cost and, therefore, does not require funding. In Italy, as is known, by virtue of this recognized need, a mechanism for public financing of parties was envisaged. In 2013, as a final outcome of the first Great Outrage following the Mani Pulite explosion, it was completely abolished. But has politics ceased to need funds for this reason alone? Of course not. So it would be important for some representative of the Indignati, perhaps in the face of the Toti case (or the previous Apulian and Piedmontese cases) to find the courage to say: “gentlemen, we were wrong”, perhaps it is better for Italy to restore the public financing system. We bet no one will. In fact, it is too convenient to indulge in invectives against adversaries rather than think courageously about past mistakes and the solutions to be found. The rhetoric against public financing of parties has been so dominant that it even contradicts Sophocles’ prophecy: “no lie grows old over time”.
But let’s turn the page. If there is no public funding (and politics needs money to exist) what is left? There is only one answer: private financing. Moreover, in the United States this is the only form foreseen and for figures incomparably higher than those generally discussed in Italy. Let us then ask ourselves the most important and most embarrassing question: why should a private individual finance a party or an institutional leader? There are only two possible reasons: for sharing values and programs or because it believes it can count on the favor of its beneficiaries. Or for both. There’s no point in being hypocritical. The word “interest” is not a dirty word, and alongside the word “values”, it creates the combination on which politics, all politics, is nourished. More: on which every free society feeds. From this point of view there are only two aspects to verify. The first is whether the private financing took place in a regular manner, following the required transparency criteria. The second is whether or not any “favours” dispensed by politics (whether contracts or concessions) have ignored the relevant laws. If even just one of these violations exists, the judiciary must carry out its task undisturbed. Otherwise it is not clear what process can be brought against a “legal” private loan. Unless we consider every connection between a private individual and politics in itself an illicit act. And perhaps this is precisely the afterthought of the Indignants. Something that, on the contrary, in the United States no one dreams of imagining.
Upon closer inspection, however, the Italian problem is even bigger. The fact is that the so-called “judicial revolution” (an expression which is actually an oxymoron) of the 1990s ended up determining a historical misperception: the reduction of the Italian crisis to the legality-illegality conflict. Relegating to the background the real reasons for the lack of Italian modernity: the very stability of national unity, the anachronistic structure of the State and the government, a social pact that has now aged between categories and generations. It is very important to clear up this misunderstanding, not to lower our guard against corruption, but because it is precisely from this that the crystallization of two “parties” that block public discourse on justice has occurred in our country. within a pre-modern scheme: the presumed conflict between the party of the judges (legality) and that of power (illegality).
If Italy remains a prisoner of this caricature it will never become a civilized nation. The problem of a democracy, in fact, is not whether corruption exists within it or not (given that the “good man” is a utopia) but what concrete mechanisms it provides for transparency. From this point of view, neither indignation nor acquiescence towards power will ever help us. In other words: in the absence of explicit violations of the law, criminal law cannot govern this matter. Whether the private financing-politics relationship will have produced growth and development in the territories or, vice versa, waste of money and degradation is up to the voters to decide.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Read the full article at
The morning
