Sovereignty belongs to the tenders that exercise it in compliance with the budget constraint
(… I apologize: I have neglected you for various reasons, including the need to intervene in a very local debate, which however, as you will see, also has something to teach us about the issues that have brought us together here… )
As I think I've already told many of you, and I'm telling everyone else today, when it was decided, against my expressed wishes in the political secretariat , to give confidence to the Best (LVI), I, having let the initial tumult pass, and having prepared myself with healthy and Leninist resignation to eat my daily spoonful of chocolate (certain that I wasn't alone but in excellent company), one day (it was February 2, 2022) went to the boss and said: "Excuse me, but since we've decided to throw the opinion vote down the toilet, can you give me permission to go to the constituency and recover some of the local vote?" I had in fact an idea that we would need the votes sooner than one might have thought, and my hunch proved correct. His response (accompanied by a smile of ironic solidarity): "Of course! Go, and remember: that's your home, don't always walk on eggshells!"
We were coming from a time when things weren't great: the various lockdowns had severely limited my ability to travel to my college, which at the time (and still is today) was the entirety of Abruzzo, a region that wasn't particularly large (the thirteenth largest in terms of land area) but was impervious (third in terms of mountainous areas) and therefore challenging to traverse. Those were the days when we were even forced to limit access to #goofy to 200 people. Moreover, the unfortunate circumstance of the limitation of public gatherings had also created a pernicious optical illusion in our colleagues from the North, who, accustomed to engaging in politics on the ground, raised on the myth of militancy (naturally understood as glue ), attributed the decline in consensus we were experiencing not to the reckless choice to support an enemy of our homeland and our businesses, but to the fact that Conte's wicked management of the pandemic had torn us from the life-giving contact with the terroir , a bit like Hercules had so shrewdly done to the son of Gaea, Antaeus. Believe it or not, those who had desperately wanted to commit suicide by supporting Draghi told themselves this story to rationalize the consequences and free themselves from responsibility for an action that indeed had its logic and had undoubtedly served to prevent the worst, but naturally, like everything in life, came with a price to pay (and in the end they couldn't help but acknowledge that the problem was something else entirely: the betrayal of the expectations for change held by a large segment of the electorate, whose class consciousness had been awakened primarily by this nonexistent blog…)!
But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about.
Encouraged by the leader's words, I immediately prepared to implement them halfway with gusto, because I certainly went along with them, but naturally I continued to walk on eggshells. The reason is simple: as someone who was educated in the 20th century, I know all too well the true political map of Abruzzo, which has been this way for 3,000 years and will remain this way for another 3,000 years (barring a major nuclear conflict):
At the time, I was not yet, as I later became, by a stroke of lightning on September 6, 2022, a Carecino, settled slightly southwest of Iuvanum. My identity was more plural: a bit Safino (located in the northwest portion of the Pentri area, around Aufidena), a bit Pretuzio, north of Interamnia, and above all Vestino, on the seashore, having mostly frequented the Budapest of the Adriatic (choose for yourself whether to consider Castellammare Adriatico as Buda or Pest). I was unable to perceive many of these boundaries, whose anthropological persistence across the millennia is astonishing, but of one thing I was certain: the complexity I was approaching out of duty of representation was significant and largely unknown to me. I was entering a powder keg with a lit torch, and it was essential for my safety not to stumble. Yes, because, as you can imagine (unless you're a total idiot), in my journey to get closer to the local community, I had to face a formidable enemy: the local League, of course! Nothing shocking, unexpected, or pathological. This is how politics works: it's inevitable that, however much they may love you (a little) and recognize the contribution you make to the party (not much), in a context of declining support, your friends will be the first to necessarily see you as a suffocating lid on their legitimate ambitions. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. I actually went, or flattered myself I was going, to broaden consensus in whatever ways circumstances allowed, and therefore not by raising the flaming banner of ideology, defiled by the tactical support given to our worst enemy. But it's clear that especially those who didn't know how that consensus had been formed (i.e., those who had never been to a #goofy, meaning practically all of Abruzzo) couldn't see it that way. My presence, whether I wanted it or not, was still perceived as an illicit intrusion aimed at sending conscious, or even worse, unconscious, political signals of consensus to one or another of the many tribes, and therefore, symmetrically, eroding the consensus of one or the other, raising legitimate doubts or concerns that I had to take into account in order to defuse them. What was I doing in the region where I had worked for twenty years? It seemed suspicious!
I repeat: there's nothing strange, abnormal, or wrong about this. It's human dynamics, and politics is conducted with people—that is, with pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth (so I was at a disadvantage, because I definitely lack three of these virtues: let's see who can guess). My respect for all humanity (including the one who elected me), and the little speech Calderoli gave us on March 9, 2018, at the Palazzo delle Stelline (in short: "You elected officials are at the service of the territory, you are not the masters of the territory. The party's territorial structure, that is, the regional and provincial secretaries, manages the strategies on the territory. Don't start making unnecessary noise…") had perhaps gone a bit too far, in the sense that, for one thing, four years ago I didn't even have a clear idea of my party's anthropic geography; I didn't even know which provincial and city officials to ask for a visa to access its territory! It was an extreme respect for the dynamics of local supremacy that I had never claimed to influence, a respect that perhaps went beyond dispassionate disinterest and bordered on culpable indifference or careless unawareness: it's one thing not to want to influence, it's another to ignore, but certainly as president of the Permanent Commission, the things to know, in the era of the spread , the banking union , the ESM reform, the "if you don't get vaccinated, you get sick, you die", and so on, were a bit too many for me to add a crash course in the political anthropology of noble Italian lineages…
I still remember when on October 16, 2022, the then regional secretary called me urgently to tell me that my decision to go to the FAI day in Monteodorisio (a Dantesque place, as you may not know, because Charles of Anjou, the one who in 1273 had drawn the administrative boundaries of my constituency , had given it as a fief to that guy who didn't say anything, but let it roam, just looking, like a lion when it alights: you would never have imagined that the Lombard soul had ended its days in my fief , which at the time was his, right? See how much you learn on Goofynomics?…), I was saying, my decision to attend the FAI day had triggered a major political earthquake with even the threat of resignation, because our local representative had rightly resented not having been forewarned of my presence. Needless to say, the glass at the UN headquarters didn't rattle, but it would be foolish to dismiss the matter so arrogantly, because in fact… our local representative was right (and I'm not saying this because we've since become friends and speak often): after all, I was his MP, and he had every right to welcome me and be close to me (and it was also in my interest, for reasons of image and substance, to be welcomed and accompanied), even if I had received the event's announcement and the invitation from the mayor (and not from him, as perhaps would have been desirable)! The truth is that even with my parliamentary experience, as in other circumstances in my life, my apperception had not been altered in any way by assuming a new role. In short, I've been a second lieutenant, an associate professor, a senator, a member of parliament, and various other roles, continuing to feel like Alberto (as I am and was), and without realizing, for example, that as much as I may want to obey my Albertian nature (and therefore avoid men, pursue silence, entertain you, etc.), in Abruzzo I am the honored one, and I must behave as an honored one, precisely to be compliant with my Albertian nature, which is also and above all an inexhaustible yearning for perfection (after all, this too is part of the genius loci ). I remain grateful to those (as in the episode I told you about) who warned me against certain dynamics, and helped me manage them: every day you learn something.
The attitude of those who know it all is different, those who say, "I'm sure I was, but you got out of the euro yesterday!" On one side are them, and on the other are the votes, at the end of a process whose complexity is unimaginable to anyone who hasn't decided to undertake it, striving to leave some eggshell intact! I won't bore you further with this discussion of the method : I have much to say about how my experience in the region has enriched me in terms of understanding political (i.e., human) relationships, for example, by helping me understand how certain dynamics were indeed political and not personal, and thus to not take them personally but manage them politically; in terms of understanding a fascinating region, whose unrecognized richness continues to amaze me more and more every day; But also, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about, in terms of a greater understanding of the perverse dynamics in which the European superstructure envelops us, dynamics that can only be fully understood when you begin to ask yourself concrete questions, such as: where does the money to repair this road (or this school, or this aqueduct) come from? Why are we building a bike path here instead of a decent road? Why do I have the money for a nursery if I need a retirement home?
Here: this is what I wanted to talk to you about.
I wanted to share with you a reflection I was making on the sidelines of the conference on mountains organized in Gamberale:
A conference that was very successful, which was seen as a work of political goodwill, and which I would never have thought of organizing if that brief dialogue I told you about had not taken place on February 2, 2022, simply because I would never have known who to invite!
Now, just so you know: the issue of the mountain law has sparked endless controversy at the local level, all of which have in common the fact that since the law was pushed by Calderoli, those who considered themselves "left-wing" also felt compelled to oppose it a priori, without even reading it (something easily demonstrable and proven in the appropriate forums, including the local press). One of the many accusations leveled is that the municipalities "downgraded" from mountain to non-mountain would have been denied access to certain regional funding lines, obviously based on European funds. This is actually how things stand:
And so, in short, the municipalities were complaining that they would no longer receive money they had never asked for. However, I avoided throwing these numbers in the interlocutors' faces, because I believe the problem is broader. How many times, walking around my constituency, do I hear: "I have this project [or this problem, or this need]: Sir, do you know if there's a call for proposals?" And how many phone calls do I receive, now that I've gained the trust of local administrators through my presence (and by walking on eggshells), asking for technical assistance on calls for proposals, on their reporting, on the IT platforms that manage them and that don't communicate with each other, and so on?
But has it always been like this?
No, this is one of the many things (the next will be the digital euro, despite my attempts, which you have ignored , to draw attention to this too-dry subject) that have happened inadvertently, with the usual mechanism of a silent and inexorable slide down a slope. I don't remember if this book:
which we have culpably kept in the background compared to the others on which we have formed our political conscience, from Titanic Europe , to The Decline of the Euro (which will return in October), to Anschluss , to Italy Can Do It , to the Euro and (or?) Constitutional Democracy , to The Factory of Falsehood , to I Am Power , to Twenty Years of Sovereignty , historically analyzed the mechanisms for allocating European funds. The fact is that over the years, these funds, which were initially intermediated by central and regional administrations, and were then channeled to local administrations through transfers, have increasingly been allocated through a mechanism of "competitive" calls for tenders. This has generated in local administrators an optical illusion similar to the one my academic colleagues are subjected to: the illusion that what they call "Europe" is generous and funds them because they are good! Now, things aren't like that on at least two levels: the first, which you've now grasped, is that the money that superficial observers think comes from so-called "Europe" actually came from our own pockets (and therefore there's no question of generosity); the second, that the "competitiveness" introduced by the tender process doesn't presuppose any particular scientific or administrative "skill" on the part of the winners. Compiling tenders has now become a science in itself, fueling a parasitic consultancy economy and profoundly undermining the meaning and logic of a sound administrative science. With the tender process, in fact, it's not resources that are put at the service of rational planning, but rather planning that makes itself available from time to time to the theoretically available resources. Are you in a mountain town of over-seventies not served by those deplorable, non-green infrastructures called provincial roads? So maybe you need a road or a hospice: but if the call is for daycare centers, the "good" administrator will apply (perhaps tweaking the demographic statistics a bit) and if he's lucky (or a good consultant, handsomely paid) he will then have to rush to build a nice daycare center in the demographic desert, only to discover later (or know from the start) that he doesn't have the funds to maintain it.
Note the irony: the funds that follow this pattern are primarily those so-called "cohesion funds," yet there is nothing more disruptive than this mechanism, for the simple and obvious reason that only large municipalities can participate with any hope of winning the lottery of calls for proposals, the "Games Without Borders" of cohesion funds. Small municipalities, in fact, simply lack the human resources to compile calls for proposals and report on the convoluted "European" IT platforms, and so either rely on the parasitic economy of consultancy (one of the many parasitic economies that so-called "Europe" fuels in its desire to disguise as a "market" what in many cases should be a natural "State," i.e., a political decision…), or they succumb, seeing the phantom European funds slip away to more "attractive" entities simply because they are larger. The famous "Europe" that, according to the astonishing Spinelli, was supposed to effectively combat "monopolistic tendencies" has in reality become a pervasive instrument for the concentration of power, also through the perverse logic of its "cohesion" policies.
When did this happen?
Establishing a precise point is difficult. European logic is that of sorites : when does the latest absurdity transform the system into a pile of unmanageable nonsense? From what I have been able to reconstruct, the introduction of the "call for proposals" (in which individual beneficiaries participate) rather than the transfer (intermediated by central authorities) as a mechanism for allocating funds dates back to the 1994-1999 programming period, but its prevalence is said to have established itself starting from the 2000-2006 programming period: it is from that moment that the Regions became the bodies managing the calls for proposals, in which Municipalities, Unions of Municipalities, Provinces, etc. participate. From a legislative perspective, this is said to have occurred withCouncil Regulation (EC) No. 1260/1999 of 21 June 1999 laying down general provisions on the Structural Funds , and with the subsequent Regulations that support the Multiannual Financial Frameworks. But I must confess that I have not done a sufficiently in-depth analysis, nor have I found texts that describe this evolution: I lack the time to study, now I only have the time to observe.
I would therefore keep to a more general level of analysis, to highlight two elements.
The first is the double disintermediation of national politics that this mechanism achieves: a disintermediation of objectives, which are those defined elsewhere ("competition," "green," etc.), and a disintermediation of management. In this amusing game, the local representative is no longer able to assert, for better or worse, his knowledge of the issues, nor to assert, in any forum, his own assessment of priorities, by virtue of the mandate the voters have conferred upon him. I repeat: if "the tender," this new metaphysical entity exercising its sovereignty over our administrators, imposes bike lanes, they will be bike lanes, not provincial roads, and the local elected representative, regardless of his level, can do nothing but comply if he wants to appear relevant. Now, this mechanism, of course, could be viewed favorably from an anti-political perspective, one that viewed public intervention as always and only a factory of clientelist consensus. As such, it should be removed, as far as possible, from the purview of the local political class, which would only use it to perpetuate its own interests, and entrusted to other, higher-level bodies, not only in an administrative sense, but also and above all in a moral sense (as the Santer Commission affair, or Qatargate , to name two examples, fail to demonstrate)! Unfortunately, even the acceptance of such an absurd and cumbersome mechanism is a perverse fruit of the Grillanza…
The second is that we're still stuck with the "European parrot." While Samuelson (or perhaps it was Fisher) reminded us that to make a good economist, all you need is a parrot and teach it to repeat "supply and demand," you'll have realized by now that to make a good pro-European, much less is needed: for the pro-European, demand doesn't exist, only supply exists, and, consistently, current spending has no value; only gross fixed investment spending should be promoted because it increases productive capacity (unless it is savagely cut in a pro-cyclical manner, but that's another story). Now, if you notice, the entire rhetoric of cohesion, but also of recovery and resilience, is based on supply-sideism, a supply-sideism that often takes on absurd, paradoxical characteristics. The example of daycare centers is sufficiently eloquent. While it's plausible that there may be a need in many places, the fact remains that it's not the provision of daycare that increases the demand for children (which, if we really want to reduce it to economic logic, perhaps depends much more on the stability of employment prospects). More generally, the formation of physical capital, if cleansed of the toxic waste of green ideology, would undoubtedly have an impact on productivity in a country like ours, savagely devastated by a decade of destruction of public capital . But what's always missing in this supply-side rhetoric is recognition of the role of current spending on the maintenance and operation of physical capital. We're always dealing with the same old story: putting ten tractors on a field doesn't make it productive. Farmers are also needed, and they are current spending. But no one seems willing to abandon the rhetoric of "unproductive current spending."
What's the summary of this long discussion, which brings together things you already knew, and things you and we perhaps missed? I'd summarize it this way: we're in a phase in which, paradoxically, we can afford the euro, but not the European Union. The former, after the internal devaluation pushed by the Democratic Party, is clearly not an obstacle to our competitiveness, even if it obviously remains a brake on our growth (as an external constraint). The latter, however, continues to cause allocative distortions and impose failed political directions (limited to the economic sphere). Returning sovereignty to the people also, and above all, means removing it from public tenders. But if I look around, there are very, very few people like me who consider absurd this mechanism whereby our money is returned to us only if we decide to do with it what others decide for us. Faced with such an absurdity, the question of the unit of account fades into the background. Taking back control of our destiny is a more complex task than inexperienced and inexperienced intellectuals present it to you, and in this the experience of the "territory", for better or for worse, is an essential lesson.
(… I have a terrible memory, but I write everything down. I can't wait to publish my diary. But in the meantime, let's reprint The Decline of the Euro, and reread Community Funding …)
(… the freedom to write on a blog that no one reads is priceless: but even here, not everything should be written! …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/02/la-sovranita-appartiene-ai-bandi-che-la.html on Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:16:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.