It is very unlikely, if not impossible, that Italians will have any regrets about 2013, one of the toughest and most difficult years since the post-war period, not only on an economic level but also and above all on a social, political and civil level. We had never known a recession like the one we went through, with the merciless destruction of jobs and the drastic reduction in incomes and savings, but the worst legacy that the year that has just ended leaves us this is not it. It is not the first time that Italy has had to face the harshness of the crisis and the difficulties of a reconstruction that does not spare any corner of the country, but there is an abysmal difference compared to the past. In the difficult post-war years sacrifices were daily bread but there was an unshakeable force that animated Italians: the hope of making it and the certainty of a better future than the present. Unfortunately this is precisely the fading of hope of people of all ages but above all of the new generations - the worst of the legacies that 2013 and the immediately preceding years leave us. Blame the recession and the international crisis? Until a certain point.
Even America has experienced a crisis since 2007 that had a precedent only in '29 but, even with all the problems that remain open, it is coming out of it with its head held high. Not to mention Germany or Great Britain. Here the crisis has detonated more ancient evils and has mercilessly reminded us that even the Italian starlet is short of breath and is not eternal. Either you change or you die. One cannot live for twenty years without growth and development, and even less can one survive with dignity without a ruling class, primarily political but not only, worthy of the name and faced with a vertical fall in public ethics. What is most striking and saddening is the barbarism that invests, with rare exceptions, every aspect of public life: from politics to business, from justice to information.
It is not surprising that the collapse of the Italian system extinguishes the hopes of a large part of the country, of a country that has long since lost its bearings and is struggling to find one. And it is even less surprising that the usual prophets of doom and the many improvised sorcerer's apprentices speculate on the rubble of a country in tilt. Usually the "the worse, the better" is the defeatist slogan of failures and those who would like to build their fortunes on the ruin of others. It's like that this time too. Italy produces prophets of doom in industrial quantities and, as always, draws them from among those who have failed the challenge of change. Among these there are above all three that shine today (so to speak...) for fascism. The first is definitely Beppe Grillo, the second is called Silvio Berlusconi, the third is the League.
It only took a few months to show even the blind and deaf people that politics is too serious a matter to be left in the hands of a comedian. Grillo is very good at haranguing the people and at teasing the legitimate instincts of a protest and a revolt simmering in the country but he has never even remotely succeeded in transforming consensus into a political alternative and least of all in producing the beginning of a change. But of protest alone he dies. And when one's political heritage does not give, due to one's own incapacity, the hoped-for fruits, the step towards adventure – how do we want to call the insults and the pillory of the opponents chasing each other on Grillo's Facebook page? – is short, indeed very short. It is not surprising – and we are the second subject in the field – that Silvio Berlusconi is increasingly found alongside Grillo today. The former Knight had a fortune that few have ever had in his life: that of trying three times to govern the country. But three times he has inexorably failed, demonstrating the fact that winning the election does not guarantee the ability to govern. Except for the wickedness of the Porcellum there is not a single act of Berlusconi's twenty years that will be remembered in the history of Italy. His definitive conviction for tax fraud - a crime that is most heinous for those who have been called to govern - enraged the leader of Forza Italia who - like Grillo and like the League - would like to make the country pay again for its failures and overthrow its bitterness on the Head of State who only last spring, on his knees, begged to stay at the Quirinale. It is true that this is a country without memory but one cannot think that all Italians are foolish and forgetful.
Ditto for the League which will go down in history for having wasted, through rudeness and incapacity, the unique opportunity to direct the just anti-bureaucratic intolerance and the desire for decentralization of the Italians towards a modern federal state and which, on the verge of desperation, it is returning to the drift of a secessionism without any prospects.
It is no coincidence that Grillo, Berlusconi and the League are today united in their squalid battle against a gentleman like Giorgio Napolitano, who in these perilous years has been in Italy but also in the world one of the few bulwarks and one of the few points of reference of a country in evident identity crisis and in blatant confusion. Today Napolitano and tomorrow the euro. It is all too easy to foresee that this threefold bankrupt will seek revenge in the next European elections under the banner of a laughable fight against the euro which always eludes the basic question, which is only one: how many Italians, in the name of an adventurous return on the liretta, would they like to halve their assets and income overnight to follow the poisoned sirens of Grillo, Berlusconi and the League?
However, it is time for the pro-Europeans and the reformists to wake up and give battle in Italy and in Brussels. Not with words, which nobody cares about, but with deeds and reforms. Unmasking the prophets of doom and freeing the country from sorcerer's apprentices is both cause and effect of the change – civil and political even before economic – that Italy can no longer wait for. And it is certainly the best omen that can be made for the new year that awaits us and for those who do not resign themselves to the suicidal logic of newly minted worstism.
