In view of the December 4th referendum, reasons for voting are being listened to that go beyond the constitutional reform and many refer to completely different concerns and impressions, sometimes the strangest.
It is striking, in particular, that no attention has been paid to the international consequences of a referendum result in which the No votes prevail.
For Italy, exams never end
Traditionally, Italy is under judgment for the instability of its governments: more than 60 in just over sixty years, as is known. And the European community seemed to have accepted the thesis that the turning point in internal politics, achieved two years ago with the introduction of the primaries in the majority party, marked the beginning of a new stability of Italian governments.
The victory of No would easily lead to opposing considerations. Indeed, the motivation for the victory of the No declared by many is the need to overthrow the current Prime Minister and his government.
I vote No because I think of something else
Many international circles would probably observe on the matter that democratic regimes are such precisely because they prepare the means to replace governments and prime ministers; but that generally in advanced democratic countries this does not happen to the detriment of reform policies that Parliament, in repeated votes, has judged to be in the constitutional interest of the nation.
It therefore arouses great amazement that a reputable person like Mario Monti, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, even theorized the need for this all-Italian aberration. Let's imagine that no one could have foreseen it, on the Colle, when a life senator was appointed to allow him to more easily follow the constitutional procedure for replacing the Hon. Berlusconi at the head of the government.
Furthermore, the European Union had granted the significant budgetary flexibility that Italy had requested: and which was precisely based on the guarantee that the reform policy necessary to restore the country's financial condition would continue.
It is to be feared that this too could be revoked in doubt by an outcome of the referendum involving a government crisis and the beginning of a politically unpredictable period: in which the sort of political Lescano trio who led the No campaign (the famous Grillo-Salvini-D'Alema) would effectively assume the political direction of the country.
The Italy of waltz tours?
Unfortunately, the comedian who leads the 5-star Movement has also made statements that Massimo Franco, in his usual note in the Corriere, judged particularly incongruous. There has been, he says, "a forcible introduction of the issue of foreign policy into the electoral campaign" with the imprudent invitation not to respect an international commitment already made in the Atlantic Alliance (the participation of Italian soldiers in the NATO contingent placed to protect the Latvian border).
“Perhaps the Government did not think that the anti-European party entered the referendum campaign using this argument,” wrote Franco; but the fact is that this “risks relaunching suspicions about a de facto alliance between European populist forces and the Kremlin; and forces us to ask where Italy, the Euro and the EU would go if these movements were to prevail”.
Impeccable. How many surprises electoral campaigns reserve.
