If you want to understand why the South is so lacking in infrastructure and, as Marco Esposito writes, is a ‘disposable void’, just see the episode of ‘In altre parole’ on La7 on 4 May.
With Gramellini and Vecchioni, yet another drama about the politically correct hypocrisy of a certain Northern intelligentsia in favor of the South was aired, and with Di Giovanni the Tafazzism of a certain Southern intelligentsia full of what Carlo Levi defined as the inferiority complex of Southerners and the consequence acquiescence towards Northern interests.
The subject of the debate is the Bridge over the Strait, which should not be built because there is much else to do first: the railway to Matera, the train between Agrigento and Catania and so on.
The need for infrastructure in the South is enormous, and for 163 years no infrastructure has been built in step with the times and in these conditions someone will have to explain to me why the Mose is being built in the North AND the Pedemontana, the BreBeMi is made AND High Speed, hospitals are built AND the schools. In short, in the North everything is one ANDin the South however everything becomes one OR. The Bridge over the Strait OR What? Nothing. ORbecause there is always one at the Strait Bridge OR better, ideal and more necessary thaumaturgical to contrast; Nothing because nothing concrete to be achieved and the fruit of a plan at the service of a vision is ever opposed.
Now I am not asking this plan from Gramellini, Vecchioni or Di Giovanni, who can only repeat the most hackneyed clichés given the mental laziness of Italian intellectuals, but the parties of the No to the bridge, PD and M5S, given that they are asking for votes in the South, should together with the No propose an investment plan in the South as an alternative to the Bridge and at least of the same amount.
For example: all the cities of the South, even if limited to the most important ones, are not nodes of a network of connections and transport, like those of the North, but only the terminals of the South North connections: the useful route for emigration and travel hope. So where is the infrastructure plan in the South to connect, for example, Taranto and Reggio Calabria with high-speed rail and motorways instead of the very dangerous Ionian state road? Or where is the plan to create the Lauria – Candela canceled by the Prodi government, because we had to enter Europe and take the Euro? Incidentally, no significant infrastructure was obliterated in the North at that time. Even a minimum plan with almost zero cost such as the rationalization of airports is missing. There is always a benaltrism void of concrete proposals that only emerges when discussing the bridge or the railway in Matera or the state of the connections in Sicily. Meanwhile, the long infrastructural gap between North and South, which has matured in 163 years from the Unification of Italy to today, is enormous and is increasingly increasing. I must say that benevolentism has a good hand, because the people of the South, accustomed to having nothing, when they see a work of this kind on their plate they become disoriented and say: but how? If we are stuck at the bridge, do we even cross the bridge?
So courage: bring out this extraordinary infrastructure plan in the South, as an alternative to the Bridge, to remove it from isolation and put it back at the center of Mediterranean trade and ensure that it is no longer the outskirts of the outskirts of Europe. Otherwise all this and everyone, intellectuals and parties nominally in favor of the South, will only provide the alibi for never doing anything.
Like that the Bridge would be a gift to the mafia, and as if the Mose had not been a gift to the largest corruption network ever seen in Italy or as if, given the events of Antonveneta and the Venetian banks throughout the region, they had all closed bank branches. Or, worse, as if in the South the State had renounced legality and abandoned it to the mafia.
And so we arrive at the last alibi for doing nothing in the South and at the same time saving one’s soul: resources, which are always found in the North and never in the South. If we made all the necessary infrastructure in the South perhaps we would also understand the usefulness of the Bridge which should be one AND and no longer one OR.
Sooner or later someone will have to explain to us how and why we are getting into debt with the PNRR and not using it to modernize the country. In addition to the infrastructure in the South we have a capital that has a non-existent subway system, there are an infinite set of works to be done everywhere, such as the motorway to Latina. Instead, as with European funds, we go into debt for the bean festival, to finance agritourisms in unattainable places, to build youth centers where young people no longer exist, to continue to support private entrepreneurship and push it to innovate only to then have it fall back into the abyss of a country with infrastructure from the early twentieth century and therefore unable to be competitive without public contributions. We continue to propose recipes that have never worked and will never work, such as advantageous taxation or the single or non-single SEZ, for the simple fact that it does not represent a useful value proposition, they modify in a breath the structural disadvantage of Southern production.
Perhaps we should take a tour of Spain and its cities to understand how to modernize the country with European funds. However, let’s stop always blaming politicians when we have such a lazy and conformist intellectual class that is unable to produce anything useful as a vision for the South other than cloying anthropological questions.
