After the presentation of the Monti Agenda on the programmatic and reformist guidelines that are at the basis of the Premier's rise in politics, nothing better than the scrapping of the opposing extremisms of Brunetta of the Pdl and Fassina of the Pd requested during the week by the Professor is worth photographing and defining with exactness of the political horizons of Monti's initiative itself and his will to break the stale polarization between right and left to strike at the heart of conservatives on all sides.
But why is Monti targeting two opponents who couldn't seem further apart? In reality, while differing in the solutions proposed, Brunetta and Fassina have many traits in common, both distant and opposed to Mario Monti's reformist and pro-European vision and recipe.
The first point that unites Brunetta and Fassina, but also a large part of the Pdl and Pd, is the underestimation of the crisis and the inadequate perception of risk, with the consequent fallacy of the proposed economic policies. Neither of them seem to grasp the epochal nature of the global crisis and consider that, if the recession can perhaps end towards the end of 2013, on the contrary the crisis – according to what the econometric models of the most accredited research centers suggest – it won't finish before another seven years and therefore it cannot be tackled with hot pannicelli or with old-fashioned recipes that are not in the least up to the challenge of our times.
The second point that unites Brunetta and Fassina and which derives from the first is the misunderstanding of the interweaving between the national crisis and the European crisis and the underestimation of the fact – crucial – that the Italian crisis cannot be resolved at home and does not tolerate domestic shortcuts but calls for a vigorous European strategy.
The third point that brings Brunetta and Fassina together is the inability to understand that austerity alone is indeed a crippled and ruinous policy but that the battle for growth cannot cancel austerity and forget the obligation to keep public finances in order as a premise for respecting the balanced budget agreed at the European level: in other words, austerity alone is insufficient but still necessary.
The fourth point that takes Brunetta and Fassina astray as a direct consequence of an analysis of the superficial crisis is the inadequacy of their respective programmatic proposals which take the form of a return to "tax and spend" in Fassina and in the dream of an unrealistic privatization drive in Brunetta who does not take into account the fact that the biggest privatizations have already taken place - despite his political godfather (Gianni De Michelis) continuing to defend the entrepreneurial state of the golden age - and that the other privatizations (especially at the local level) they cannot be resolved with a flick of the central power's magic wand but take time.
This is why – as a fine reformist of the Democratic Party such as Umberto Ranieri, one of the politicians who has always been most listened to and most loved by President Giorgio Napolitano, acutely wrote yesterday in the newspaper – Monti's initiative fills a political void that Berlusconi and the right have never able to fill both for their cultural limitations and for the incapacity to govern and to reform the country. But it also fills the gaps of a left that the good Bersani deludes himself into dragging onto coherent reformist shores but which is weighed down by the lack of understanding of the real dimension of the international crisis and which continues to stubbornly separate domestic policies from European ones.
This is why – writes Ranieri – it is time to liquidate two colossal nonsense that stand out in the electoral campaign and which Monti's anti-Brunetta and anti-Fassina offensive helps to demolish:
1) "it is necessary to put an end to the chatter about the renegotiation of the commitments undertaken by our country at the European level and which guarantee that even indebted countries like Italy will have virtuous behaviour" in budgetary policies;
2) "there must be no uncertainties about continuing the reforms initiated by Monti: enough with the obsession - insists the reformist politician closest to the Quirinale - that the mission of the Democratic Party must consist in reviewing the reform of pensions and the labor market" as improvidently suggest the Fassina and the Damiano, not to mention Sel.
If these ambiguities are removed, it is not impossible that, after the elections, a government based on the Monti-Bersani axis could be born, with Europe and change as its beacons, but for this to happen, in addition to the consensus of the Italians, it is essential that the Democratic Party - concludes Ranieri - "do not stop at Fassina's jokes on behalf of the Monti list liquidated as a Rotary list" which, however, are less ruinous than his improbable economic recipes.
