It is a curious paradox for those old enough to remember. There was a time when the world seemed motionless and Italy was unsteady. When two empires solidly divided the planet. We were part of the Western one but with a damn fear of slipping into the Soviet one, which extended very close to our borders over an immense area, 22 million square kilometers, five more than those with which present-day Russia is still the largest existing nation.
It was enough to cross the Adriatic and there were mysterious Albania and threatening Yugoslavia, although not part of the Warsaw Pact, to warn us about the communist proximity, embodied in our country by over 12 million PCI voters. A more than sufficient reason to endure internal uncertainty as a decidedly lesser evil. We put up with governments driven and majoritarian by the Christian Democrats, even if every year or so we had to change the prime minister.
Then everything changed, with a rapidity and suddenness all things considered unexpected, even if the entire process lasted almost thirty years. Fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the USSR, the Spadolini, Craxi, Prodi and D’Alema governments as prime ministers, but meanwhile the Italian communists had become Democrats of the Left, the four of the Cavaliere, the Berlusconi II who still holds the record for duration. Until September 4th, when Giorgia Meloni will beat it, changing the just won silver medal with gold and commenting it with a touch of justified self-congratulatory rhetoric: “Not a milestone to celebrate, but an even stronger responsibility.” In what we stubbornly call the West, Italy today appears as a little light of stability, if not a beacon.
The runaway engine of today’s world seems indeed the inexhaustible and unpredictable series of announcements by Donald Trump, the very latest being those on tariffs on European cars, the withdrawal of troops from Europe and the threat to move to Cuba, after Venezuela and Iran. Coincidentally two essential energy suppliers to China which, after the long period during which we considered it the core of the new contemporary imperialism, perhaps imperfect but stable, appears strangely silent, peripheral. Perhaps we are attracted by a roaring noise and distracted by more significant under-the-radar movements, stirring in some shadowy area of the planet with exotic place names.
Uncertainty hurts as much as the conflict of which it is consequence, cause and scenario at the same time. Let’s hold on to the Meloni government as an anchor not to sink, to float in the imperfect storm we find ourselves in. A lasting center of gravity, if not permanent.
