The ongoing judicial case regarding the alleged irregularities committed by the president – pro tempore of the regional council of Liguria is taking on very interesting aspects, at least in terms of the analysis of political dynamics.
by Franco Astengo
The main theme, at this moment, concerns the line taken regarding the relationship between the suspect and his institutional role, the majority that supports him, the operations of the administration (with at the center the continuity of projects that directly concern reality involved in the investigation: “primarily” the port of Genoa).
The suspect, currently under house arrest, has set a course of rejecting the requests for resignation formulated by the opposition, asking the representatives in the Council of the lists that had supported his election to reject them unitedly.
Of course it is not a line that declares the president’s extraneousness to the disputed facts but, by claiming their regularity, it intends to mark a new line of defense compared to previous episodes of intertwining between moral question and political question occurred over the years in many regions (and local administrations) in Italy and which had – to some extent arisen from the scandal Thick of 1983 (exploded at the same time as the Turin case Zampini – Biffi Gentili which recorded the mayor’s positive leading role Diego Novelli).
The line developed, in this case, by the president of the Liguria Region Toti is based on two assumptions:
1) to weigh, in the judgment of the magistrates, the goodness of the work of the regional administration in defining new projects for Liguria and consequently to highlight as part of the judgment the need not to break operational continuity with the prolongation of restrictive measures (of which no furthermore, revocation is requested, almost as if this should come from an independent conviction of the magistrates);
2) redefine the boundaries between political financing and the role of the administration, believing – essentially – that the adoption of ad hoc measures in exchange for funding for electoral campaigns and the ordinary functioning of political groups is right. A codification positioned as an evolution (to simplify) of the concept of exercise and result of a work of lobbying placed in close relationship with the operational needs of the administration.
In essence we are faced with a very precise question concerning the private financing of administrative action in the face of an exercise of agreed planning: financing which can then be transferred to the subjects who contribute to the formation of decision-making and political representation and who now represent a whole one with the subjects who carry out the administrative activity (on an institutional level the element just described originates from two factors: the direct election and the nomination of the directly elected President by the Executive Committee. This note promotes a reflection “up” with respect to the premiership and “down” with respect to the evolution of the direct election mechanism of Mayors).
We find ourselves faced with a much more subtle fault than that classically represented by the giving of bribes which once generically flowed into the “political exchange”: a completely internal trend in the change of direction in the conception of division of power and cancellation of the border “historical” between public and private.
The annulment of the distinction between public and private seems to represent the distinctive feature of a new technocratic right flanked by the populist right in order to form a historical block of a new “hegemony of interests”.
Franco Astengo
2/EDITORIAL BY STEFANIA ALOIA DIRECTOR OF THE XIX CENTURY THE DAY AFTER TOTI’S ARREST
