“We put ourselves to work to create jobs. At work for those who don't have it, for those who have it but have no dignity, for those who give it today, such as entrepreneurs, for those who have worked in this country for a lifetime and have yet to retire”. Thus spake Zarathustra. The government led by a professor and two students out of course, on the day of the oath, sent a signal - albeit encrypted - for what will be its first moves: in practice, it will try to dismantle the labor and social security reforms implemented during the last two legislatures.
It matters little that the employment rate is recovering pre-crisis levels. According to the Report Istat 2018 in Italy, the sustained growth in the number of employed continued in 2017, 265 thousand (+1,2 percent), which particularly affected women (+1,6 percent against +0,9 for men). In 2017, the rapprochement of the number of employed people to the levels of 2008 was achieved exclusively by the female component, 404 more units, while men recorded a deficit of 471 units. The tendential increase affected all areas of the country, while the South and Islands remained - the only geographical division - with a negative employment balance compared to 2008 (-310 thousand units, -4,8 per cent).
In 2017 it also continued, for the fourth consecutive year, the increase in the employment rate, which stood at 58,0 per cent (in April 2018 there was a further increase of 0,3%): a value, however, still far from the EU average, especially for the female component. But the "lawyers of the people" propose to assist their clients also from what is only perceived to them. As Luigi Di Maio – at the head of a ministerial conglomerate that holds together both Labor (with associated social policies) and economic Development – is not satisfied with implementing employment, but also wants to fight work "that has no dignity", of which the neo -minister has particular experience of a personal nature. So more jobs, with stable relationships and early retirement: it will be twice Christmas and party all year round. But what measures will be able to perform such a prodigy?
Apart from the introduction of a statutory minimum wage for cases not covered by collective bargaining, the restoration of voucher, the cut of the tax and contribution wedge, the fight against precariousness remains confined to the vague: "Particular attention will be paid to contrasting precariousness, also caused by the "jobs act", to build more stable working relationships and allow families to plan their future more serenely". Words, words, words, which imply more or less than one might expect, depending on one's point of view. Much more defined is the position in terms of pensions (share 100 or 41 of payments regardless of age); however, it is not understood what will happen with regard to the old-age treatment and the automatic coupling to the increase in life expectancy. The answer will probably come when the names of the deputy ministers and undersecretaries are announced and if he will land at Labour Alberto Brambilla, the League's ideologue on social security, whose proposals are known.
The cards will be revealed at the (next) moment of the presentation of the Def; and in any case the first measures will be included in the budget bill for 2019. If it starts from revision of the jobs act and by stop the Fornero pension reform, the yellow-green government (it continues to be called that even if the League symbol is now blue) will greatly embarrass the opposition, making their task even more difficult. There is one Liaison dangerous between a substantial area of the political and trade union left and the M5S; the same that exists between dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde. The famous doctor, in Robert Stevenson's book, is forced to transform himself into an amoral and violent character in order to be able to satisfy - in the Victorian era - a sadomasochistic sexual propensity that he is unable to practice with his girlfriend.
Metaphorically speaking, the M5S and the League can afford not to give a damn about budget rigor, labor market reforms and welfare systems, while the government left is prevented from expressing itself freely - despite harboring similar impulses in its DNA - in the good society where it has managed to land after decades of marginalization (and which now turns its back on it). That's why, the Democratic Party would find itself in serious embarrassment in front of the tampering with the 2011 reform, the institution of the basic income and anything else imaginative that is written in the contract. Out of a duty of objectivity, it must be admitted that it will not be easy for Forza Italia to oppose initiatives from "killing me softlyfor this poor country.
It may sound unpatriotic, but our only hope rests on the markets. It will be them - even before a ramshackle EU - to punish "de-fascist" initiatives of the new government. But it will still be a hard and difficult path, from which even more devastating reactions could arise. The problem is not the government, but the country. You shouldn't look at the finger, but at the Moon. The initiative he led Giuseppe Carneade Conte at Palazzo Chigi is not an accident in history, a deviation from the usual path: it represents Italy today, a country whose interior minister is an ally of Marine Le Pen and which is the leader of a party given by accelerated polls growth.
Castor and Pollux are right de noantri: a profound landslide has taken place in Italian society, values that we considered consolidated have been overturned, we have become accustomed to drinking water from wells poisoned by hatred, anti-politics and social envy. A country accustomed to recognizing itself only in the national football team (Winston Churchill said that Italy fights wars as if they were football matches and the latter as if they were wars), has found itself sovereign, surrounded by enemies, oppressed by demoplutocracies, locked up in the concentration camp of the euro, eager to affirm the primacy of the national interest with the same enthusiasm with which the "good soul" claimed a "living space".
Italy has returned to performing a laboratory function of political involutions: a century ago it gave birth to fascism, today it is giving them to anti-system coalitions (neither of the right nor of the left because they are both right and left at the same time) which will act as a point of reference for similar phenomena widespread in more or less all countries (and, why not?, starting from the USA). Not by chance
Steve Bannon, Trump's ideologue, came to observe this experience closely and with interest because – in his words – it is the first and only case in which populisms of the right and the left have allied themselves, forming an invincible front. After all, if in France last year, we had voted with a Rosatellum-like law, considering the common programmatic requests and the same basis of consensus, perhaps an alliance between Marine Le Pen would be in power today (despite the roots of the Front National in the Vichy regime) and Jean-Luc Mélèncon. Basically, the risks of returning to the sad passions that led, in the heart of the Old Continent, to two world wars during the "short century" are not completely and forever foiled.
