The more you look at Italy, the more you compare it with the rest of Europe and the more, for the first time in many years, you can’t help but think, for an instant, that for once normality is Italian and European madness. Last week’s elections, if you think about it for a moment, contributed to amplifying the gap that exists between our country and the greats of Europe. In GermanyAs you have seen, only one voter in three voted for the parties in government. In FranceAs you have seen, the opposition party, the Rassemblement National, has doubled the party that leads the country, and while the Lepenists barely exceeded 31 percent, the Macronian list stopped at 14 percent. Result: parliamentary elections called for the end of the month. In SpainOnce again, the People’s Party won the elections, as had happened in the general elections, and reminded Sánchez’s socialists that they should lead their country from the top of a botched government – the socialists are allied with small parties, including the independentists of Catalonia – it’s not the best and is, from the point of view of the popular people, a disgrace.
The more you look at Italy, the more you compare it with the rest of Europe and the more, for the first time in many years, you can’t help but think, for an instant, that for once normality is Italian and European madness. Last week’s elections, if you think about it for a moment, contributed to amplifying the gap that exists between our country and the greats of Europe. In GermanyAs you have seen, only one voter in three voted for the parties in government. In FranceAs you have seen, the opposition party, the Rassemblement National, has doubled the party that leads the country, and while the Lepenists barely exceeded 31 percent, the Macronian list stopped at 14 percent. Result: parliamentary elections called for the end of the month. In SpainOnce again, the People’s Party won the elections, as had happened in the general elections, and reminded Sánchez’s socialists that they should lead their country from the top of a botched government – the socialists are allied with small parties, including the independentists of Catalonia – it’s not the best and is, from the point of view of the popular people, a disgrace.
In Austriathe far right of the FPÖ, albeit by a few votes, won the elections, overtaking the traditional parties. In Belgiumafter the elections, the liberal prime minister resigned and left politics. In EnglandPrime Minister Sunak has chosen to bring forward the vote, and if the English manage to find stability after 4 July it will not be, as it has been in the past, an element of normality but will be an exceptional element considering the impressive number of governments they have had in the past recent years from the UK (Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak: four in four years, from 1990 to 2010 there were three in twenty years). And after all, if you think about it again, observing the faces that animated the G7 in Puglia, all the leaders of the largest countries in the world arrived in Borgo Egnazia rather bruised. Joe Biden is in full election campaign and his chair creaks. Conservative Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s approval ratings have reached an all-time low. The consent of the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is at a loss and in less than a year Canada will go to the vote. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is in deep crisis, crisis of consensus, of leadership, economic crisis, and Germany is already moving forward thinking about the aftermath, after the elections which will take place in September next year. We have already talked about Sunak. Of Macron too. The more we look around Europe, and around the world, the more we have the impression that in a changing world, in a Europe that is shaking, in a G7 in which the leaders are hanging by a thread , the only incredibly stable, unexpectedly robust, surprisingly solid country is one and it is the least predictable: Italy.
In Europe, the government parties are weakening, everywhere or almost everywhere, in Italy the government parties are strengthening: all of them, without exception. In Europe, the social democracies are weakening and, except for rare cases like Spain, they leave the field to the more extremist left-wing forces, in Italy the left-wing populist parties are retreating, except for Avs, and the traditional left-wing parties are improving, winning votes and stealing them also to populist parties. In Europe, traditional bipolarism is jeopardized by the growth of anti-system parties, see Germany, in Italy bipolarism, after years of weakness, is once again asserting itself. If you look at the new Italy, however little you may love those in government or those in opposition, you cannot fail to notice the state of grace that our country is experiencing. Stable government, stable majority, reorganizing opposition, President of the Republic who enjoys cross-party consensus, decreasing unemployment, increasing employment, decreasing inflation and constantly improving growth despite a growing but kept under control debt as much as possible. The more you look at Italy, the more you get the impression that our country is experiencing an unexpected state of grace that arouses two equal and opposite sensations. On the one hand, obviously, a feeling of relief. On the other, of impatience and frustration. Meloni has no internal adversaries, it has no external adversaries, it has an economy that does not create problems for it, it has a Europe that is not hostile to it, it has an American administration that supports it, it has investors who look at Italy with hope and in the face of all this it is inevitable that the Meloni government is destined to enter a new phase in which there are no longer any excuses for making mistakes, for governing badly, for not daring, for not doing everything necessary to make Italy go at the right cruising speed. It will no longer be tolerable, therefore, to see the government stumble when it comes to making the Pnrr travel quickly, to urgently resolve the problems of the single network, to intervene promptly on Ilva, to cut spending to lower taxes, to establish the laws that concern the reform of justice, to allocate something more than the paltry 1.6 percent of GDP to innovation and research, to expand its ruling class to overcome the season of systemic mediocrity, to compete with the rest of the European countries on the topic of venture capital, to revise the law on the premiership in order to avoid getting hurt by a referendum and to work so that Italy, with the new balance, can count on Brussels, can curb extremism, can work to have a Europe capable of strengthening itself also to strengthen Italy (it is no coincidence that the country most penalized on the stock market in the aftermath of the French electoral disaster was Italy: the more Europe’s possibilities will diminish to grow, to integrate, and the more Italy’s troubles will increase). Meloni has no enemies, he has the stars aligned, he has economic aid from Europe which will allow Italy to grow in the coming years despite its sins in terms of wages, productivity, competition and efficiency of the system and from today on then offloading the problems that Italy might have onto someone else will be difficult because the European elections, if it were ever necessary to do so, confirm that Meloni’s only opponent is called Giorgia.
