2019: the Sardines, like it or not, stopped the Captain

I read with interest the article by Giuseppe Baselice on the movements of 2019. I too think that there is no greatest common divisor of the experiences which, in the year that dies, have spread to every part of the earth. And these movements have not always brought forward – I am referring above all to the yellow vests – innovative instances. But I do not venture to make definitive judgments based on superficial knowledge of what has happened in the world. Instead, I am impressed by what happened in Italy, in about forty days, with the sardine movement.

It is difficult to explain this sudden and unexpected political (even more than social) phenomenon and to venture into the search for its prospects. I can only note that, after the first interest aroused in the media, an attempt is underway to underestimate the event, with the same logic of the scholar of the Betrothed, who denied the existence of an epidemic in Milan, because the plague was "neither substance nor accident".

For the sovereign and populist right, dominated by Matteo Salvini and convinced of representing and speaking in the name of the people, the sardines, a movement that contests the squares of the Captain all along the Peninsula, are certainly a disturbing presence the result of a machination and a conspiracy. But how to prove it? Sardines are not an expression of the notorious elites, of strong powers, they do not live in ZTL areas. They are an anti-populist people, who ask nothing for themselves, but consider Salvini the emblem of an unacceptable and dangerous policy for the country, not only in terms of the economy, but above all as regards democratic institutions, the demands of civil life and the European design.

But the left is also in great embarrassment. Being now an inverted King Midas, he fears polluting the freshness of the new movement. Above all, I believe, the left, in its various facets, feels that the sardines have attached an enormous straw tail to their backs. She had a people at her disposal and she hadn't noticed it. His exponents wandered through the suburbs with their heads covered in ashes and deserted the historic centers whose votes they repudiated; they shed warm tears for the workers (or rather the workers) aligned with the League, as if the working class were still the one depicted in Pellizza da Volpedo's painting, bearer of the stigmata of progress over the centuries.

And woe to evoke the presence of authoritarian tendencies, much less the risk of a para-fascist regime. If someone dared to do so, the first to scold him were the dem, especially those of the former PCI matrix. Nevertheless, the values ​​of modern super-populism (identity, nationalism, chauvinism, autarchy and - subtly - racism) were not so different from those of the fascist totalitarianisms of the last century.

Sardines came out of the shadows and took to the field because warned that the country was in serious danger and that the defense of democracy represented the "first life" of Italian society. The left does not need a palingenesis, a return to the past: this space is now covered by the right which is not socially conservative, but competitive in terms of promises through the exercise of an incomparable demagoguery. It is enough to remember the fundamental values ​​and fight for them.

The choice is easy, but the battle is hard. It seems to be back to the Great War, when the enemies broke through our lines at Caporetto penetrating kilometers into Italian territory. The Piave became the line of resistance, to defend which the class of '99 was called up. Who knows how many sardines were born in 99, perhaps a century later.