The Italian emergency: democratic principle, the rule of law, equality before the law in crisis
What happened last week to the leader of the port of Trieste, on strike against the imposition of the Green Pass in the workplace, is in many respects disconcerting, while for others it confirms a trend line in the relationship between public power and citizens in place since some years. Stefano Puzzer was expressing his dissent with respect to government health policies all by himself, sitting in a corner of a Roman square: a form of protest that basically showed a strong respect for state institutions, perhaps if I may say so, greater than that. that the latter have demonstrated for the solitary demonstrator, who through the intervention of the public force – that is, that force exercised in the name of the law and the Italian people – was removed and was even forbidden to return to the capital for a year.
It was not a good page in the history of civil and political life in our country. It was instead a manifestation of both strength and weakness on the part of the State, and since a mixture of strength and weakness and above all an sometimes illogical and incomprehensible alternation between the two has characterized the action of representatives of public power in Italy, some commentators are starting to wonder if the Italian state, which with all its flaws since the fall of fascism is a liberal democratic type, is not slowly transforming itself into something else.
For decades now, books and articles have followed one another that speak of the "decline of the West" and that predict the future, wholly or partially, of some of the cornerstones of social and political life that are typical of countries with Western culture and therefore also of the our. Many begin to wonder if, as in the ancient fable of Aesop, after having shouted so much "wolf", the wolf, even if it has not yet arrived, is not around the corner. In my opinion, a brief analysis of the "state of health" of liberal-democratic principles in our country gives rise to some concern.
For many years now in Italy the head of the government has not been chosen on the basis of the popular vote and the typical mechanism of democracies seems to have broken down, which causes political leaders to propose their respective government programs to the electorate and once they have obtained their approval. try to implement the same with the prospect of responding again to the electorate for their action. To this we must add that the President of the Republic, not elected by the people, from being an organ of guarantee of the constitutional legality of government action has gradually transformed into an organ with competences also of political merit, and this without being subject to the judgment of the voters. If we also take into account that the most important laws and economic and social policy choices are now adopted not in implementation of a mandate received from the voters, but in the name of needs (for example that of adapting to the decisions of European Union officials) that has nothing to do with the will of the same, one can only conclude that the democratic principle is in full crisis.
Not just it. Even the principle of the "rule of law", according to which the public power issues the rules and then is the first to respect them is no better off. The emergency laws, as many have pointed out, are becoming permanent and the various governments (including the current one) tend to decide at their discretion when and how to use the exceptional powers, which as such should be limited as much as possible, and linked to objective parameters ( no other Western country has formally issued such rigid measures to combat the epidemic). This applies in particular to compliance with constitutional rules: for example, the law can impose mandatory health treatment (such as a vaccine) but cannot alternatively limit other constitutionally protected rights, such as that to work. In other times, the Constitutional Court would have declared all the rules on the green certificate illegitimate as the result of an "excess of legislative power".
Are we therefore slipping towards a rigid absolute state of an ancient regime, such as Frederick II's Prussia or Joseph II's Austria, where the sovereign regulated the life of individuals on his own initiative even in the smallest details in view of the public interest? Not really: those states were characterized by equality in applying the law to their subjects while the Italian situation is very different. Some squares are equipped with electronic sensors to prohibit gatherings, while in other parts of the cities organized crime can act without too many obstacles, and "rave parties" can take place undisturbed. The individual who protests is turned away by the police, but they can even be attacked with impunity in a physical sense by representatives of foreign NGOs who want to impose their questionable concepts on immigration policies. Even equality before the rules – even if the equality deriving from obeying a sort of absolute sovereign – is failing.
So, it will be said, towards an absolutism based on the discretion of the sovereign such as the French one, which works when a capable monarch such as Louis XIV manages the state and which instead creates damage if directed by a Louis XVI? Not even: in this type of state the discretionary and sometimes inconsistent decisions of those who govern were always implemented only thanks to the action of public officials. Few rules like the one on the green certificate show instead that in essence the public power in Italy tends more and more not to deal personally with the application of the rules that it emanates, except for those situations that serve to present a facade of rigor behind the which hides an opposite reality. Apart from the very extensive cases of undeclared work, by definition outside the respect of the rules (the threat of closing an activity that should not have been opened has no effect), even in "normal" situations the Green Pass is not required by the police, but "randomly" by the colleague in charge of controls, by the restaurant waiters, by teachers or school collaborators, etc. In most cases the certificate is just a formality that is not taken into account, and many say that it works precisely because it is not applied to a large extent, but when it is this is due more than to the fear of the intervention of forces. of the order, to that of the complaints and / or grievances of those who, at times driven by a respectable fear of contagions (which however does not take into account the equally respectable fear of others of the effects of vaccines), sometimes driven by less noble reasons they want to force their fellow citizens to comply with state regulations. In this way it is private citizens who actually perform public functions, just as, vice versa, public authorities behave more and more like private subjects, requiring citizens not so much to "obey" the rules in view of the public interest, but to " do not disturb the driver ".
The Puzzer case is emblematic: the leader of the dockers was prevented from continuing his protest not because it was in itself illegal, but because it occupied public land, as if the latter (beyond the legal quibbles, of which on other occasions similar was not taken into account) was not instead available to everyone to express their ideas. If the democratic principle, the rule of law, equality before the rules, and even the distinction between the role of public authorities and the position of private citizens are in crisis, then the predictions that a liberal democracy like the Italian one, already " weak "even in optimal conditions, may in the not remote future transform into a non-Western type of power system (that is, that the wolf can really arrive) are not so far-fetched.
But what could be the form of power that would be established, what non-Western model would it approach? Someone speaks of a "Chinese" drift, but in my opinion this is unlikely: in China, totalitarian power is imposed through a rigid discipline from below, quite the opposite of the slope on which our country risks slipping more and more, a slope which can lead to a political system made up of a mixture of authoritarianism and anarchy, combined with each other by a public power that intervenes to almost arbitrarily support (albeit under the veneer of formal legality) the positions and interests (noble and less nobles) of this or that pressure group without leaving any protection to individuals other than to rely on the winning groups. In my opinion, the danger is not of becoming like China, but of becoming like South America.
One of the major issues of debate among historians of the modern age is why the two parts of the American continent, as the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville already noted in the first half of the nineteenth century, have created formally almost identical state systems that however they have led to such different concrete political realities, the Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies in the North, and the political systems substantially of a non-Western type, as they lack the distinction between the public and private spheres in the South. Our country is not yet at this point but, at least in my humble opinion, the danger of degenerating into a South American form of power is real.
On closer inspection, some characteristics of that type of political system can already be glimpsed: the uncritical exaltation of the role of government members seen as "world champions" of political activity; the mobilization continues in view of some emergency to be overcome or some objective to be achieved; the growing indistinction between political positions that should be opposed and should confront each other in a democratic dialectic; the tendency to favor foreign economic investments (perhaps coming from those countries which, their goodness, provide us with the funds to overcome the crisis) over free national initiatives; and last but not least the increasingly clear separation between the perfect facade and the chaotic reality of public power. The real risk is that of moving towards a formally flawless system and no different from that of liberal democracies, where however in fact there are no more rights but everything is granted by a "strong" authoritarian power, which however acts in an arbitrary and "weak way. ”In accordance with the choices of the economic and social groups that support it.
The sincerely democratic and liberal people of Latin America have always fought and are struggling (sometimes successfully) to change this type of power: for us the road to such an outcome is perhaps still long, but the danger is concrete, even if the trend is still – we hope – reversible. There is a lot of talk about recovery after the pandemic: we can only hope that the days we are living will be described by the historians of tomorrow as those in which the Italian state managed to restart liberal democracy after the emergency (and without liberal democracy there is no economic growth is not even stable, as the beginning of the crisis in China is demonstrating), and that they are not remembered as those in which the representatives of public power were not able to allow a citizen with a few signs and a few empty chairs to express your dissent.
The post The Italian emergency: democratic principle, rule of law, equality before the law in crisis appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lemergenza-italia-in-crisi-principio-democratico-stato-di-diritto-eguaglianza-davanti-alla-legge/ on Wed, 10 Nov 2021 03:51:00 +0000.