The judicial investigation that overwhelmed Liguria a month ago shows us once again that Italy needs more rules. Those rules that international institutions, from the Council of Europe to the European Commission, promptly recommend to us. Rules that could protect us from questioning whether it is legitimate to receive donations from entrepreneurs in exchange for potentially compliant decisions. Rules that could help us highlight the boundary between public and private interests. Rules that our country – now almost unique among the “large” Europeans – persists in not wanting to give itself.
the editorial
Liguria investigation, let’s recover the pride of rectitude
by Stefania Aloia
June 12, 2024
Political financing, lobbying, conflicts of interest: these are the matters on which successive governments and parliaments cannot agree, leaving a regulatory void that not only undermines public integrity, but also Italians’ trust in institutions. And which has harmful consequences for the business world itself: while a certain policy tends to favor the interests of local entrepreneurs, foreign companies and capital prefer to avoid Italy due to its lack of transparency and its confusing regulatory framework.
A law on lobbying would help regulate once and for all the relationships between stakeholders and those who make decisions in the name of the community. And, according to OECD analyses, it would allow GDP to grow by encouraging investments from abroad, attracted precisely by legislation that safeguards competition.
After France and Germany, even the smaller Greece, Finland and Croatia have recently approved measures on lobbying, with the desire to make decision-making processes a little less opaque but also to overcome those asymmetries that do not allow everyone to play on the same level. Why in a country without rules, it is above all those closest to power who win, those who address the governor, the minister on first terms, those who grant funding expecting favorable treatment in return. But the risk is that the excessive proximity between business and politics causes the former to lose their creative ability, the desire to “dare”; and the second makes it lose sight of the public interest. Which could instead emerge from a transparent comparison between interests, which is completely absent today.
The absence of transparency, however, does not only threaten competition, guaranteeing protection to the most consolidated, noisy or complacent interests to the detriment of the most innovative and unconnected to clientelistic logics, but places all of us citizens in the background, disheartened spectators of events that only become known thanks to journalistic and judicial investigations.
A regulatory framework characterized by transparency, participation and public integrity, instead, it would help citizens to get an idea of the interests at stake (and therefore scrutinize the choices of public decision makers) not afterwards, in the courtrooms, but during the course of the work. While digital portals that make data on stakeholders and public consultations called by administrations with a view to making choices regarding the territory are multiplying in the world, in our country the meetings that count are held in places that are anything but institutional, far away from the prying eyes of the citizens, in whose name the choices are made.
The data on voter turnout from the latest European elections – with a further significant decline in electoral participation – point to an increasingly serious deficit in the representation of Italian citizens. It is certainly not by keeping the “control rooms” opaque, satisfying the interests of some, avoiding confrontation with citizens and limiting their right to monitor the actions of those who govern that lost trust is regained. An up-to-date political class would understand that rules in the name of public transparency would help strengthen the relationship with citizensbut above all they would help safeguard the very role of the institutions.
The author is editor of The Good Lobby
