The result collected by Matteo Renzi and the Pd alle regional elections on Sunday, which was largely predictable and which was far from bankruptcy but certainly less brilliant than the vote of the Europeans, risks fueling amnesias, misunderstandings, doubts and fears that would hurt not so much the Premier as the country.
The first amnesia to remove is that reforms are a free lunch for those who make them. As many foreign cases demonstrate, it is not at all true that reforms punish those who promote them. But there is usually a time lag: it takes time for the majority of the country to perceive the benefits of change, while in the short term the interests and annuities affected by the reforms will take their revenge and turn their backs on those who want to modernize. Certainly this was the immediate effect of the Jobs Act and the Italicum but also of the civil liability of magistrates, of the reform of the school and of the public administration and of the reform of cooperative banks.
Faced with the lack of electoral dividend from the reforms, the most sensational mistake that could be made is to step back and forget that the mission to which the Renzi government is called is not to smooth the fur of those who defend the status quo but to change the country, whatever the cost. Without bias but with determination: to change. This is the watershed between conservators of all kinds and renovators of various schools and it is useless to scramble to pretend not to understand. Fortunately, Renzi's first comments after the vote bode well.
So woe to doubting the reforms and pursuing the centre-right or the grillini or the dem minority in their plans to oppose or actually delay the modernization of Italy. The policy of reforms is not a walk in the park but Italy, like the international community, expect only one thing: that the policy of change goes ahead and that, rather than stalling, the Premier raises the bar, knowing that the alternative would only be the swamp, a luxury that the country cannot afford.
The result of the vote also presents us with a big novelty if the response from the polls is correctly declined in the light of the new electoral law and that is that, except for an improbable recomposition of the whole center-right at the moment that goes from Berlusconi to Salvini as in Liguria but with reversed, the Democratic Party and Beppe Grillo's 5 Star Movement, which has become the second national party overtaking Forza Italia and the League, will go to the ballot for future political elections.
Like it or not, that is, the paradigm on which the political system is based is being reconfigured, which appears less and less to hinge on the classic alternative between right and left but which increasingly revolves around the clash between a party that knows how to speak and represent the general interests of the Country even if obviously it doesn't entirely incorporate it and the anti-system forces, whether right or left. The clash between Renzi and Grillo or between Renzi and Salvini is none other than this: on the one hand a modernizing and pro-European strategy and on the other the protest and resentment towards the euro and towards Europe.
If this is the case, Renzi cannot think of beating Grillo and/or Salvini by softening the policy of reforms and has only one real arrow in his bow, but a decisive one: that of opposing populism and demagoguery, bar chatter, sports and to sterile protests the visible and tangible weapon of facts and change. There are no alternatives: if Renzi stops, he is lost.
But to win the battle to relaunch Italy there is another trap that Renzi must carefully guard against: that of thinking that the Democratic Party is only a variable dependent on government action and that in the end the stewardship will follow. As the Regionals have shown, this is not the case. Either Renzi, together with the country, also reforms the Democratic Party and assumes full leadership, enforcing internal democracy and keeping the party in step with the times, or he will go nowhere. Both because the often disastrous state in which the Democratic Party has been reduced to the periphery makes it impermeable or even hostile to change, and because the battle for reforms and for the renewal of the country cannot be won by always having against the internal minority which acts as side to the external oppositions and the interdiction game of the trade union.
The Premier does not listen to the instrumental appeals of those who, from the sides of the opposition, advise him to lower the shot on the reforms but do not forget that at home he has a gigantic and unsolved problem such as that of a Pd which often row against and which is of the all unfit to overcome the challenges of the future.
Reforms and Pd: the vote of the Regionals was an alarm bell but now it's up to Renzi to take the bull by the horns. He has the courage and lucidity to do it and this is what the country expects from him.
