Berlusconi caused a stir yesterday when he told an astonished President Van Rompuy that Italy and probably also many other European countries would have liked the European Union to oblige them to carry out a profound pension reform so as to make them compatible with the lengthening of the life and thus alleviating the financial burden that falls on public finances and ultimately on the younger generations who have to sacrifice themselves to pay the pensions of their grandparents and fathers.
Many were scandalized because Berlusconi candidly admitted that his government is unable to do what needs to be done on its own (pension reform, but also the sale of public assets and the reduction of political costs) because in this thus the majority parties would lose electoral support. And therefore to convince the citizens and even more the riotous members of the various political clans, an "external bond" is needed.
Beyond the somewhat crude and somewhat naive methods adopted by Berlusconi, it must be recognized that if Italy has managed to become one of the main industrial powers of the world in the post-war period, this is certainly not due to foresight of its ruling class, but to the action of external constraints that a small number of courageous men have built to pass practices and rules that Italy as a whole was not able to adopt on its own. It is Guido Carli, former Governor of the Bank of Italy, president of Confindustria, and minister of the Treasury, who explains it in the beautiful book in which, with the collaboration of Paolo Peluffo, he retraces fifty years of Italian life. “The external constraint has saved us three times.
The first with joining the international monetary system born in Bretton Woods and with participation in the European Community. “The political parties, the state bureaucracies, the industrialists themselves – recalls Carli – did everything to prevent commercial liberalization first and the birth of the common market later. But this choice prevailed because it was decided by a very small group of people, first of all the Prime Minister De Gasperi comforted by very few men including Luigi Einaudi and Angelo Costa. The second external constraint was the birth of the European monetary system, which took place at a time of very serious inflationary crisis and terrible social upheavals. The third was the signing of the Maastricht treaty and therefore the birth of the Euro. Today we need a new constraint that is even more stringent than those of the past because despite the existence of a single currency which already in itself limits the possibility of maneuvering the exchange rate and interest rates, some countries, including our , prefer to “float declining” as prof. Tantazzi, who addressed the problems of the lack of competitiveness of the system.
Paradoxically, with the birth of the Euro, certain balance of payments constraints and certain precise prescriptions on the part of the Community authorities have eased. Since there is no common fiscal policy, each country has been able to hide its weaknesses for a long time and has thus found itself completely unprepared to face the crisis. For Italy, in particular, the loss of competitiveness and low growth had been denounced in time by all economic research centres, but the Government has always ignored them. The liberalizations were not done in order not to annoy the various corporations, the privatizations are hindered by the national and local political class, because the real patronage power is exercised over the public companies. Pensions have not been definitively reformed in order not to clash with the unions. And so on.
Now that savers are no longer so willing to subscribe to our public debt securities, we must make those reforms that we have avoided for a long time. And Berlusconi invokes the help of Europe. But these are prescriptions that Europe has already formulated and we must not forget that decisive choices always depend on the courage and foresight of a small number of people, first of all on the ambition to go down in history with decisions capable of marking a rebirth of the country, by the Prime Minister who cannot escape the weight and loneliness that the exercise of power entails in crucial moments.
