Italian Premier Matteo Renzi on his way to meeting French President Francois Hollande, March, 2016. Luca Bruno / Press Association. All rights reserved.Rome, London, Washington, Wien: these are different
and distant places. Yet it is rather obvious nowadays to connect the dots and
read them as just nation-specific symptoms of a worldwide phenomenon. We are
witnessing what is increasingly looking like the meltdown of an entire
political and economic system which has governed the developed world for at
least three decades.
In Italy, the results of yesterday’s election of local
city councils surpassed even the expectations of the anti-establishment Five
Star Movement. In Rome, the city which has lived for decades almost exclusively
off salaries paid by a heavily indebted and inefficient central administration,
only one out of ten electors voted for the Democratic Party of the PM, Matteo
Renzi.
Milan looked a certain bet only a few months ago at
the close of a successful Universal
Exposition and yet the candidate of the PD, the manager of the EXPO, Giuseppe Sala, is
forced to fight a neck and neck battle at the ballot box in two weeks’ time to
avoid defeat. Renzi has been wise enough to admit
that the situation is serious. Nevertheless there is a sense that he might be
about to pay considerably for having underestimated the mission he promised to
accomplish. In the event that both the political and economic capital of
the country are lost, even the outcome of the referendum on changes to Italy’s
constitution to be held in October is open to question. If the constitutional
changes proposed by the Government are not approved, Renzi has already said he
will resign, quitting political life, at which point his promise of change
coupled with stability will vanish.
Rome, however, is no exception. Everywhere people are
increasingly hostile towards whoever wants them to vote just for the sake of
stability and out of fear of a jump into the unknown.
Notwithstanding a deluge of analyses exposing the
economic costs of a Brexit, two very recent polls say that an outcome of the
British referendum which may not only endanger the existence of the European
Union but also the unity of the United Kingdom, should the Scots break away to
re-join the EU, is not impossible. In the United States, liberal newspapers
only talk about Donald Trump, mentioning Hillary Clinton mostly in term of ‘his
opponent’, thereby increasing the possibility that the least politically
correct politician in history will become the most powerful man in the world.
One glimmer of hope, in fact, came out of the very
close presidential elections between nationalists and greens in Austria only
two weeks ago: they, however, showed that the only politically strong response
to whoever wants to build walls and close borders, is a proposal which is
equally strong and in the opposite direction, towards an even more open
society.
Middle
ground losers
EXPO 2015 – Milano – Piazza Castello, Expo Gate. Wikicommons/ Stefano Stabile. Some rights reserved.The real loser is whoever has been in the middle
ground, governing complex societies for decades through tactical, marginal
adjustments and pursuing stability as the supreme, overarching priority.
This is the meltdown of a political system which has
governed the world at least since the end of the Cold War. It is paralleled by
an even more worrying meltdown of an economic model and of the instruments we
have been using since WW2 to understand how well economies were functioning in
order to make them deliver prosperity to a sufficiently large number of people.
The centre has disappeared, together with the
middle-class that found in that centre (whether alternately leaning towards the
left or the right) its natural political habitat.
Incomes
flattened
In the last twenty years literally everything has
happened to all the main economic variables but to the median income of an
American family: the data of the US Census say that it has been completely flat
since the start of “globalization” at the beginning of the nineties.
Productivity is declining, notwithstanding waves of
automation. Economic growth continues to stagnate in the west, regardless of
the fact that both the cost of money and that of raw materials have never been
so low.
The reality is that we are already in the midst of a technology-triggered
revolution which is as big as the ones that changed the world when Marx or
Keynes tried to make sense of them. Central bankers and mainstream analysts are
simply failing to understand this mutation and accordingly, governments as well
as traditional political parties seem incapable of controlling its
direction.
It would already be a big step forward if we had the
humility to acknowledge that we have a huge cognitive problem, together with the
ambition to look for solutions without limiting ourselves to the contemplation
of complexity.
Those
populists
In the meantime we should, at least, stop doing what
so many mainstream commentators insist on doing – that is, calling the
“others”, the ones who we do not understand, dangerous “populists” and “inexperienced”
adventurists.
Revolution
is by definition an unchartered territory for everybody. It is where different
“experiences” count. And what really makes the difference are those who have the
vision and the pragmatism which is indispensable, if you wish to engage people
in a transformation which is already well under way