Two years ago Corrado Augias, a refined journalist and a man of great culture, wrote a beautiful book that deserved to become a bestseller. Is titled “The discomfort of freedom. Because Italians like to have a boss", is published by Rizzoli and tells, in great detail, why history and long foreign dominations have made servility one of the most widespread traits of the Italian character. Opportunism and transformation are the natural appendages of this way of being that does not love freedom of thought or even a bit of healthy non-conformism.
All ready to get on the bandwagon of the winner and all ready to turn their backs on the first defeat. Turncoats are not just a successful literary genre. They have always been there and what is happening after the referendum and after the clamorous defeat of Matteo Renzi testifies that the quick and casual change of shirt is always a very popular national sport: who was not ashamed to shine the shoes of the prime minister and not has never had the courage to point out its defects amidst so many merits it is already ready to serve new masters and it is not surprising that Beppe Grillo's cart is becoming one of the busiest.
Matteo Renzi is and remains a champion of politics like there are few in Italy and he had the great merit of stirring up the dead mill of public life with reforms, but he made unforgivable tactical mistakes and showed defects on which he would do well to meditate and which he will have to correct quickly if he doesn't want his star to set sooner than expected.
The personalization of the referendum on the constitutional reform certainly influenced the outcome of the vote and Renzi could have avoided it, but his biggest mistake was not this, but the belief that the strategy of the reforms was a gala dinner, forgetting that, both social than political, the progressive area has always been and is a minority in the country and can win – as has often happened in the past – only through an intelligent policy of alliances.
Let's be clear: the reforms either affect positions of income and privileges contrary to general interests or they are not reforms. In the right awareness that Italy had to make up for an immense delay in achieving an indispensable modernization, Renzi put a lot of irons on the fire in his thousand days of government, but he forgot to build the social and political shields needed to secure his reforms and ended up bringing together all the oppositions offended by the affected interests, rather than disjoining them little by little and countering them with the strength of the energies rewarded by the reforms. Right and extreme left, judiciary and bureaucracy, CGIL and southern regions: it is impossible to resist such an extensive opposing front without the strength of new alliances and without remembering that the dividend of reforms never comes immediately.
What happened in the school is emblematic: the Renzi government dried up the plague of precariousness that had lasted for decades and took on the beauty of one hundred thousand teachers in one fell swoop, but with the paradoxical result of being against the endemic self-harm and corporatism of the world of the school, cultivated for years by the Cobas, by autonomous trade unionism and by a CGIL-school that has long been in disarray.
Renzi, as Galli della Loggia writes a little too superficially, it may also be obnoxious, but the real reasons for his referendum failure are deeper than his image and his communication and are largely (though not only) nestled in a completely inadequate policy of alliances, which the Corriere editorialist himself notes but not as central element.
But where do these glaring tactical errors by Renzi come from, which had manifested themselves well before the referendum? On the weak side of his leadership and governing culture. Renzi is a leader who doesn't listen and doesn't seek advisers or listen to improvised ones, who are perhaps excellent professionals but do not even know the abc of politics, like the various Andrea Guerra and Davide Serra who have gradually appeared at Palazzo Chigi. The case of Franco Bassanini who was supposed to be one of his most expert advisors but never became one is sensational to say the least, but what about Veronica De Romanis, a brilliant economist first presented as a new entry to the economic staff of Palazzo Chigi and then lost On the road?
The result was to surround himself with a mediocre team both at Palazzo Chigi (where, apart from Luca Lotti, Claudio De Vincenti and Filippo Sensi, who have always gone out of their way, there is an absolute void) and in the Government, where too many ministers (from Guidi to Madia, from Poletti to Giannini and Orlando) they have clearly shown that they are not up to the task. If from the slap of the referendum Renzi does not learn to listen to those who try to avoid pitfalls and mistakes and does not learn to play as a team, he will waste his undoubted skills and his star will soon set, to the delight of the many right-wing, center and of the left (but perhaps this is an oxymoron) crowding Parliament and the country. And that would be a shame.
To address the real reasons for the protest that is mounting throughout the country as in the whole West and which has its roots in the low economic growth and growing generational inequalities even more than between social classes, Italy still needs many reforms and it still needs the dynamism of a leader who aims to make Italy simpler and more just. Compared to the first season of the Renzi government, it is certainly necessary to adjust the shot, but not in the counter-reform sense spoken of today by those who have never wanted reforms and have always found a thousand excuses to boycott them. Renzi must find the courage of humility and self-criticism and he will do well to experience the next political appointments with the spirit of a national leader rather than with an obsessive spirit of revenge, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be truly unforgivable.
