The blatant but fortunately harmless protest with confetti that Josephine Witt, the activist of the Blockupy movement, reserved last Tuesday for Mario Draghi to the cry of "Enough with the dictatorship of the ECB" is perhaps the most emblematic event of a week in which the clash between those who want to innovate and those who want to maintain the status quo in Italy and in Europe has affected not only finance and the economy but also industry and politics.
SuperMario Draghi will surely go down in history as the savior of the euro (“Whatever it takes”) and for that reason of Europe, but also as the most powerful recovery engine of the Old Continent that his courageous Quantitative easing is putting day after day in action. The president of the ECB deserves a monument for what he has done and what he is doing to pull Europe out of the most devastating crisis of the last century and, if today the devaluation of the euro, the extraordinarily low rates and the abundance of liquidity restore confidence in the economy and ignite glimmers of recovery, the credit is all his and the extraordinary diplomatic skill with which he managed to dribble, with the benevolence of Angela Merkel, the stubborn conservatism and one-way rigorism of the Bundesbank. But, beyond folklore, the fact that protest movements are circulating which mystify the role of the ECB and even come to identify it in a form of modern dictatorship says a lot about the state of confusion circulating in Europe and goes hand in hand with recipes fallacies of those who, like the Grillos and the Salvinis on duty, think they are opposing change and reforms by taking the illusory shortcuts that lead to the exit from the euro.
But what happened to Draghi is not the only example of obtuse and blind opposition to those who make innovation their flag. Just think of what happened to the CEO of Fiat Chrsyler Automobiles (Fca), Sergio Marchionne between Thursday and Friday. Like Draghi, Marchionne also performed an authentic miracle that even the most hardened opponents should admit, at least in the confessional. Ten years ago Marchionne looked more like a liquidator than a manager: he had assumed the leadership of a group like Fiat which was considered technically bankrupt and on which no one was willing to bet a penny. In ten years Marchionne not only saved Fiat from certain bankruptcy but, with the successful merger with Chrysler, made it the seventh automotive group in the world. These are facts and not impressions.
In the first meeting of FCA in Amsterdam Marchionne announced that for 2015 the group aims to sell more than 5 million cars and make more than one million profits. But that's not all, because on Thursday evening, as soon as the Dutch assembly closed, the FCA CEO extracted a bonus for the workers of the Italian factories from a minimum of 1.400 to a maximum of 5 euros a year through a revolution in wages which aims to tie wages to company results and finally retire not the normal trade union dialectic but the prejudicial oppositions between capital and labour.
In another country, as actually happens to him when he's in the States where he's considered a kind of hero (primarily by President Obama), someone like Marchionne would be led in triumph. And not just from the shareholders that he made a lot of money to. Instead open up heaven. For trade union maximalism, Marchionne's revolution is not a beneficial revolution but a kind of coup. A bit like Matteo Renzi's Italicum is for the Civati, the Bindi, the Fassina and all the dwarfs of Italian politics. If it weren't pathetic, it would be almost amusing to watch the competition between Fiom secretary Maurizio Landini and CGIL secretary Susannna Camusso, two imaginary progressives but in reality uncompromising conservatives who will go down in history for never getting it right. not even one by mistake. Here then is Landini claiming that Marchionne's project is "the death of the union" because it "cancels his role by reducing him to a notary spectator" and here is Camusso echoing him by saying that "great news has been built on nothing because Marchionne's project it is no different from the many performance bonuses of many companies with the difference that the FCA thinks of a unilateral system and not based on bargaining ". But is the union a means or an end? From the words of Landini and Camusso it seems unequivocally a self-referential reality and an end in itself and it does not matter that in the pockets of the workers of the Italian FCA factories – precisely in the hours in which Whirpool surprisingly announced 1.400 redundancies and the closure of the Caserta plant – there are to get good money.
But the vast collection of general self-harm and poorly disguised conservatism is not exhibited only in the world of finance or industry but also has its own special stage in politics where farce never sets. It is a curious coincidence that everything happened in the same week but it is no coincidence that the most obtuse worstism sounded its trumpets precisely against Mario Draghi, against Sergio Marchionne and against Matteo Renzi who at this moment can rightly be considered the bishops of the modernization that the economy and politics need to sell. In Italy as in Europe.
It wasn't necessary for a politician of race like former president Giorgio Napolitano to say it to understand that an electoral law like the Italicum is indeed a compromise, the offspring of the political balance of a bizarre Parliament, which does not fully satisfy anyone's wishes, but which is still better than Porcellum or Consultellum and even more than nothing and that only political rancor or the suicidal instinct can lead to destroying what has been painstakingly built. Because even children know that claiming to amend the Italicum once again in the Chamber and send it back to the Senate, where there is no certain majority, is not the same as improving it but destroying it. With the good result, which the stubborn minority of the Democratic Party does not seem to realize, of hitting not so much or not only the prime minister but the whole country and its international credibility.
Wisely, after winning another round on the Italicum in his party's assembly of deputies, Renzi left the door open for dialogue by leaking his willingness to review the reform of the Senate once the electoral law had been secured. Since one of the most captious arguments of the dem opposition has always been the democratic deficit deriving from the conjunction between Italicum and the non-elective Senate, one would expect a signal of appreciation for the premier's openings. But common sense is not always common sense.
The cases of Mario Draghi, Sergio Marchionne and Matteo Renzi complement each other and could lead to the bitter conclusion that the evil combination of populism and self-harm is an almost insurmountable obstacle to change. But the facts advise a more confident reading. We don't discover today that modernization is not a gala dinner but a very tough battle that can never be won once and for all. But then one cannot be surprised that the resistance of those who would never want to change anything becomes more bitter precisely when there are those who do not preach innovation but do it.
