Simplify, simplify, simplify. Above all, simplify the relationship between the citizen and the bureaucracy. We have always talked about it, but the reality is disheartening. In a recent editorial on the Corriere della Sera, Sabino Cassese, who in addition to being judge emeritus of the Constitutional Court was also Minister of Public Administration, appropriately recalled that to open an ice cream parlor 73 formalities are required with 26 different entities and a cost of 13 euros and that 900 days have already passed for the disbursement of the six billion euros of the Anas program contract which should have been available in 90 days.
These are numbers and facts that cry out for vengeance and that add up to the daily tortures of citizens whenever they have to do with the public administration. Yet in words they all agree, both the government majority and the oppositions, on theurgent need to modernize the public administration – which is the mother of all reforms – to digitize it, to de-bureaucratize it and finally to put it at the service of the citizens. The National Reform Program recently presented by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri also talks about it. And in these days Parliament is discussing the so-called Simplification Decree on which, however, about 3 amendments have already gathered, for half of the majority, and which, after the approval of the Chambers, will require a good number of application decrees to become truly operational.
The modernization of the Public Administration, but it would perhaps be better to say the humanization of the bureaucracy – which is one of the real strong powers of our country and which is immensely to blame for Italian immobilism – could be done with reforms that cost nothing economically. And in some ways the same goes for Justice and for the school, which not only require investments and hiring but above all innovative ideas and programmes. Yet it is not possible to move the great bureaucratic jungle. How come? Because whoever holds the real levers of power and hides in the maze of the state has no intention of giving up. But not only for this.
Cassese identifies other causes that prevent or slow down the reforms that do not cost and which are often the most useful precisely because they involve crucial relationships between the state and the citizen. The first reason is political indifference, which does not find advantages in reforms that take a long time to become law or to be fully applied and do not offer immediate advantages to the minister or to the parliamentarian today on the political scene. The second dramatic reason is instead linked to skills shortage of our politicians: it is not indifference and it is not a matter of lumping everything together, but the deterioration of the quality of the current political class – emphasized by populism which despises knowledge and prefers demagoguery a lot per kilo – compared to a few decades ago but even just a few years ago it is there for all to see.
Of course, all this is added media responsibilities, whose attention to changes that do not make a fuss but that can improve the condition of citizens is infinitely less than that reserved for the latest beach gossip or the latest gossip from Montecitorio.
How sad. But one question remains: where is it written that we really have to resign ourselves to this humiliating degradation of national life? It would be nice to know.
