Unsolicited advice from Nicola Zingaretti. Signed: Michele Magno
Charismatic leaders on the left today are not seen. But there are good administrators. Rome is in dire need of it. So Zingaretti allow me some unsolicited advice: think about it seriously, I'm sure you would make an excellent mayor. The comment of Michael the Great
In the last years of his life, Emanuele Macaluso disconsolately repeated that the Democratic Party was not a party, but a political-electoral aggregate, a jumble of currents linked only by a shared power pact, locally and centrally. The reasons given by Zingaretti to motivate his resignation seem to me to largely confirm this judgment. Now, let's put aside the long chain of errors, on which rivers of ink are already pouring, culminating in the Largo del Nazareno crisis. The truth is that the "idleness" of its leadership team denounced by the secretary dem raises an old question: why over the course of the century, first in a silent form, then gradually more noisy and sensational, the distrust of parties has exploded so sensationally?
At least in Italy, the answer that has perhaps received the most credit is also the simplest: the "caste" has become unbearable because, as they say, "there are no longer the leaders of the past". The elites are no longer, as Vilfredo Pareto wrote, elected classes made up of those who excel in various fields, including that of the art of governing. None of this seems possible today. Almost all the current party leaderships are widely discredited, so much so that the only unanimous demand that arises "from below", whenever there is talk of electoral law, is that of removing the power to decide candidacies from the secretariats.
Furthermore, the crowd of officials and middle managers who occupy the apparatuses, as well as the multitude of parliamentarians, are often considered as examples of unpreparedness, poor knowledge of problems, inefficiency and parasitism. They are even branded as venal and business, marked by the vice of privilege and a corporate spirit, as well as a widespread servility. This is an explanation which, however, explains little. Because it would be necessary to understand why the mechanisms of representative democracy, rather than the best, select, if not the worst, the mediocre. The theme of institutional reforms, always evoked and never tackled with the necessary determination, thus returns to the field
The same applies to the forms of selection (primary and congress, above all) of the leaders in the party system. Empirical evidence tells us that they played a crucial role especially in extraordinary situations, such as a war, the foundation or transformation of a state, a great national emergency (sincere wishes to Mario Draghi). Charismatic leaders on the left today are not seen. But there are good administrators. Rome is in dire need of it. So Zingaretti allow me some unsolicited advice: think about it seriously, I'm sure you would make an excellent mayor.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/un-consiglio-non-richiesto-a-nicola-zingaretti-firmato-michele-magno/ on Sat, 06 Mar 2021 07:15:09 +0000.