Let’s go back to proportional?
We publish an excerpt from “Dragons or chaos? The great disintegration of Italy: there is a way out "the new book by Lodovico Festa and Giulio Sapelli (Guerini and GoWare editions)
The temptation is widespread in various circles, among parliamentarians desperate for their own particular future, among companies frightened by any change, in the economic and social spheres that do business in growing disintegration, to try the company "at any cost" to stabilize the situation as it is. It is thus hoped to obviate the hardships that a return to "politics" implies, it is hoped to avoid the tiring definition of serious relations with and social bases, it is imagined that it is possible not to engage in the improper effort to organize cultural platforms even before politics and to select leadership within articulated management groups and not only through a demagogic-charismatic way.
There are hypotheses circulating that they would like to take up Emmanuel Macron's experience of governing by excluding a majority part of the electorate, opposing right-wing demagoguery and left-wing shipwrecks, as well as emptying the right of government with media-judicial initiatives. It is the route that Matteo Renzi attempted in some way a few years ago.
And miserably failed because as we have also written previously, in Italy there is neither a state nor an establishment like the French one that can manage such an undertaking.
The "peasant" alternative that is beginning to appear is that of returning to pure proportional. A night where all the cows are gray, and politically painful choices can be postponed indefinitely.
Of course, there is nothing in itself condemned a priori in the proportional voting system. All the states of Northern Europe, starting with Germany, have forms of proportional with sometimes minimal corrective measures. In Southern Europe, Spain today has a political system in crisis but which has worked for a long time thanks to a rigorously corrected proportion of the abundance of very small colleges. While Greece has safeguarded its governability despite the proportional, thanks to the award reserved for the list that got the most votes.
Historically a proportional system works especially if it has deep historical and recent political cultural roots. The precious function of the Republican Party and the Liberal Party for Italian politics was such because it could refer to the Cavour and Mazzinis. Now when behind Matteo Renzi we essentially grasp the profile of Marco Carrai and behind Carlo Calenda that of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the situation has changed a lot. Clear historical-cultural roots that make a majority system vital do not seem to abound. When Walter Veltroni tried to point them out to give the Olive Tree a historical basis, it was even more ridiculous than it normally is by mating Che Guevara to John Kennedy. Nor does Enrico Letta seem so much more lucid in "circumscribing" common cultural roots for the Democratic Party, placing himself between the Gospel of Andrea Riccardi and the battle to undermine the traditional family of Alessandro Zan. Nor is the panorama more comforting on the right: “social” strategies abound, while “cultural” ones are hidden.
The proposal of a return to proportional today is not based on homogeneous cultural visions, but on the objective of building a convergence between more or less declared emerging interests in society, and the aspiration to self-referentiality of a political class heir to concluded experiences: this 'last a classic case of "dead" that aims to grasp "the living".
In short, preparing to give life to a Parliament devoid of clear guidelines determined by the electorate in this phase of supreme disintegration of the political system ends up being throwing the match in the petrol can.
In some more politically qualified circles a proportionalist spirit is nourished by the noble search for a serious relationship between historical and cultural roots and political commitment. But this relationship can give life to something concrete if it is connected to real movements of society, to vital currents of public opinion and if it proves suitable to face the problems posed by the here and today. It becomes sterile if in the end it is nothing more than a pursuit of nostalgia.
A neoproportionalist operation would actually make sense, in the election of a constituent assembly to be supported by Parliament to change the fundamental Charter of the State, a commitment that would require mobilizing the cultural currents that formed the national unitary state, making them compare to those that they have grown in these thirty years and thus allow the re-foundation of the Republic by welding the past and the present.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ritorno-al-proporzionale-puro-la-via-che-emerge-dal-nuovo-libro-di-festa-e-sapelli/ on Fri, 19 Nov 2021 06:40:17 +0000.