Ballot boxes and shouts: yesterday’s day with Giorgia Meloni’s briefings to the Chambers could be summarized like this. A one-two punch of speeches with reply and counter-reply that clarified very little on the substance and confirmed a lot in the method. It was all already foreseen: that the premier would accuse the opposition of not wanting to go to the polls, because they are more worried about their divisions than driven by the uncertain consensus gathered with the referendum; that she would take Elly Schlein as the privileged interlocutor, preferred as the current leader and apparently weaker than Giuseppe Conte.
But well above the little predictable substance there was the confirmation of the approach we have always witnessed in these controversies: shouts and ballot boxes, exaggerated tones aimed at emphasizing one’s own identity and respective oppositions, so that the ignorant masses are convinced to go to vote. In media terms, this is called a confirmation process prevailing over the attempt at conversion, but also metacommunication prevailing over communication. A dynamic of influencer and follower which, in politics, long precedes the advent of social media. Nothing new, in short, but this does not console, rather it worries to foresee that things will go like this or even worse for about a year, until the next general elections, making impossible not only any agreement — it would be a utopia just to hope for it — but even a serious confrontation.
Meloni, it has been very highlighted, accentuates the low and cavernous tone with occasional highs, the voice volume is on average high and ready to explode, the Roman accent that in the past she sometimes tried to contain. Some disdainfully call her a “fishmonger,” but she knows it and makes it a pride or at least a look. Garbatella outfit, despite the suit and the etymologies inserted in every speech (the word tale derives from the Latin talis which means…). The left, for their part, bring out the selfie with the FDI militant suspected of mafia ties and even Meloni’s father who abandoned wife and daughters when they were children, as if they wanted to raise the ball to let her slam dunk. These are from Tomaso Montanari’s latest book on why the right is “still” fascist, an adverb that indicates an anthropological and racist view, more than a political one.
We live in a world where competence is subordinate to opinion, authority to popularity, we know it. This is why politics finds it convenient to give up on technique, on the science of institutions, and reduce itself to pros and cons, opinion against opinion. Avoiding confrontation with a complex and articulated factual reality that is not easy to understand before even explaining it, let alone solving it. The real country, as we used to call it, is reduced by Schlein to the decline in purchasing power of wages and by Meloni to some propagandistic exaggeration, but underneath there is a magma difficult to interpret. In the coming years, tensions related to defense, pensions, and climate will complicate the restoration of public accounts, warns for example the OECD in the same report in which it recognizes that Italy’s performance has improved for about ten years, with production increasing. Even if there were no wars and tariffs, the situation appears decidedly confused. And we remember what economists said at the time of Lehman Brothers, about the boxes on Wall Street, about subprime mortgages: difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. An old joke but always fitting.
