1.39pm – Sunday 2 June 2024
(The following text is taken entirely from the press note sent to the Opinion Agency) –
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Republic Day 2 June 2024, Dear fellow citizens, authorities, “We must take care of the Republic. We must take care of Europe.” It was President Sergio Mattarella who addressed this double exhortation to us, which remained in the hearts of many, in the passionate speech that inaugurated the year of “Trento, European and Italian capital of volunteering”. The care of our Republic, which turns 78 today, was immediately associated by the President with the care of Europe, close in a highly significant combination, as if the value of the greatest political achievement of the Italian post-war period was strengthened and found a an expression accomplished only within the framework of European cooperation and peace.
This link, whose meaning is perhaps not fully understood today, was also very clear to the Constituents elected on 2 June 1946: in fact, even if political Europe then existed only in the ideas and writings of daring visionaries, the Article 11 of our Fundamental Charter already prefigured the need to look beyond national borders, establishing that Italy, “on equal terms with other States”, can allow those “limitations of sovereignty necessary for a system that ensures peace and justice among nations” and therefore promote and encourage “international organizations aimed at this purpose”.
These were revolutionary words in a continent that until recently had been torn apart by war between states and between citizens of the same state. Words that were nourished by the reflections of the anti-fascists in confinement, from Altiero Spinelli to Ernesto Rossi, authors of that Ventotene manifesto which imagines a European democratic revolution inspired by the principles of peace, justice and freedom. The idea of the integration of the continent, of which the Trentino Alcide De Gasperi was later the standard bearer, in fact presupposed a community of values which still today ask to be translated into rules, projects and reforms. Ultimately, they ask for that concrete and effective care that President Mattarella urged us to take.
The Europe of peaceful cooperation, democracy and respect for minorities was a reaction to the other Europe, the authoritarian, liberticidal and belligerent one of Nazi-fascism. Likewise, the Republic born following the referendum of June 2nd is not only anti-monarchist, it is also and above all anti-fascist. In fact, the constituents excluded the possibility of writing an afascist Constitution, which considered the Twenty Years a parenthesis detached from our history, an experience concluded forever which made us immune from the re-emergence of authoritarian tendencies. From Aldo Moro to Palmiro Togliatti via Piero Calamandrei, the constituents stated in a passionate debate that no tabula rasa was possible and that the Constitution, and therefore the Republic, had to be explicitly anti-fascist for at least two reasons: to underline their direct derivation from the Resistance and to give democratic Italians a shared ideological basis, beyond their different political positions.
I believe it is appropriate to recall the ideal roots of this civil celebration in order to be equipped to face a difficult period full of unknowns, caught between two wars whose end we cannot see and crossed by a wave of political violence which had its peak in attack on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Today’s conflicts and difficulties show us that European democracy is not an inexorable destiny, it is a daily task. Even our parliamentary Republic, based on the principle of representation and on a right to vote to which we have quickly become accustomed, cannot be said to have been acquired forever. It must be defended, protected from attempts to distort it, put in a position to transform the legitimate fears of many citizens into concern for the common good.
A few days after the fiftieth anniversary of the Piazza della Loggia massacre, I would like to conclude with the words never uttered by the trade unionist Franco Castrezzati on 28 May 1974. His speech, interrupted by the explosion of a bomb which caused the death of eight people and the wounding of at least one hundred, has not lost a shred of its relevance. “If we want to deal a healthy blow to the fascist resurgences, let’s give a more precise face to this democracy of ours. Let’s give it the face of freedom, but of a substantial freedom and not just a formal one; of freedom from want and freedom of the press (…) Let us give it the face of participation, of a government in which the people see themselves, are reflected and feel represented. Let us give it the face of justice through which equality among all citizens is exalted in coherence with the values of dignity of the human person.”
Happy Republic Day to all of you
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Photo: archive
