A very critical intervention on The Manifest yesterday by the economist from Bari Gianfranco Viesti (in the picture), always close to the Democratic Party and with a title that is already a program ("Autonomy, the courage that the Democratic Party lacks"), will cause much reflection and discussion after yesterday's vote in the Senate on the disastrous differentiated autonomy, a source of potentially explosive costs for public coffers and intolerable social and territorial inequalities. “For many years now – begins Viesti, professor of applied economics at the University of Bari – the Italian centre-left and the Noon they divorced. The former seems to no longer have the interest and ability to understand the South, to question the possible levers of its development and to undertake concrete initiatives". For this reason, the Pd "it limits itself to acting as a deferral on the government's initiatives", but a great opportunity to reverse the trend could be the battle against Differentiated Autonomy to be conceived not as a simple struggle of the South but as a "great national policy".
Centrality of growth and fight against inequalities must go together
The South, writes Viesti, does not need specific measures but a reconstruction that "starts from the centrality of the fight against inequalities". But is this fight the beginning or the arrival point of a battle for reconstruction and rebirth of the South? Is the fight against inequalities, which in our country - according to the Bank of Italy - increased between 2010 and 2016 and remained substantially unchanged between 2017 and 2022 but remain unbearable, conceivable without economic growth? Where would the financial means to combat inequalities come from? Perhaps the discussion needs to be reversed: centrality to growth to overcome inequalities rather than fighting inequalities while ignoring the essentiality of growth. Growth must be the starting point and the reduction of inequalities the arrival point. Except that the battle for growth is not politically neutral but involves reforms and competition, like the Meloni government pretends to forget. And the reforms are not a gala dinner but require the fight against the positions of power which conflict with development and with the general interest but also with everyone corporatism, the localisms and conformisms which sometimes also nestle on the left. A nice challenge.
