Every dam, as we know, collapses starting from a crack, a small hole, an inlet which then fatally ends up widening until it becomes an abyss. The Lusi scandal, and then, even more, due to media resonance, the one linked to Belsito, and the use of state contributions paid to the League to cover, among other things, the private expenses of the Bossi family, has taken our attention by force and moved it, putting before our eyes the Pandora's box of public funding for parties.
A Pandora's box that had always been open, but to which, now anesthetized in the face of the continuous and entropic flow of Italian shame, too many times we have not deigned to look.
This is almost twenty years of history, which paradoxically began in the aftermath of the referendum which sanctioned, with a Bulgarian majority (it was in '93, in the midst of the Tangentopoli climate), the end of public funding for parties. Funding which, however, was promptly reintroduced, in the form of a "contribution to electoral expenses", leading to the disbursement of 47 million euros to the parties for the '94 elections.
Then came the law n. 157 of 3 June 1999, which came into effect with the general elections of 2001, which doubled the amount of the contribution bringing it to 4.000 lire for each citizen, which later rose to 5 euros, even if the multiplication factor was limited only to members of the electoral lists for the House.
This is, in short, the legislative process of reimbursements, vaguely mitigated by the various maneuvers which in recent years have led to a reduction of approximately 30%.
Then come the numbers, released in a report by the Court of Auditors, and they are impressive numbers, especially these days, in the face of cuts and labor reform. For the 2008 policies, the parties collected 503 million euros in state contributions, of which, however, only 110 million were invested in electoral expenses, a ratio of 4,5 to 1 between money received and money spent.
In the coffers of the Northern League, to give an example, 41,3 million euros of repayments entered and only 3,5 came out, but the same is true, with due proportions, for all the main parties, with the Pd which, with its over 160 million surplus, plays the lion's share.
In all, from 1994 to today the total contributions amount to 2,253 billion euros against a recognized expenditure of 579 million. For every euro spent, in a nutshell, the parties have collected 3,89.
We don't want to make a question of semantics, but words, as someone said, are important, and as Emma Bonino said, in an interview published in yesterday's La Stampa, "if you spend less than you collect, they are not electoral reimbursements, but disguised public funding". And with little control over their use, it becomes almost natural for these funds to end up in Canadian stocks or real estate renovations.
At this point, the warning issued yesterday by Espresso by Ugo Sposetti, historic treasurer of the DS, “Citizen outrage will send us all home”. Even if the problem, as always, is not the fall, but the landing, the arrival point, the fact that the most stubborn dirt, as they call it in degreaser commercials, is still difficult to eradicate. The problem is the sad awareness (Tangentopoli has taught us this) that, for every rooted system, every ecpyrosis is inevitably followed by a palingenesis, an eternal return of the always identical and that, perhaps, the dying animal of the second Republic just needs everything to change so that everything stays the same.
