In the elections of 25 September last, a little more than six million voters were missing from the polls, which is the number of voters that the PD had gathered in 2018, today reduced by over eight hundred thousand. The set of those who deserted the voteso, constitutes the second Italian party. In four and a half years, electoral turnout has fallen by nine percentage points, with abstention having gone from twenty-seven to thirty-six percent of those eligible. The decline affects all the Regions, even if in Campania and Calabria even one voter out of two stayed at home.
This is a very conspicuous, worrying absence, now confirmed by a singularly growing trend: if, in fact, up until the 1976 elections abstention had always fluctuated between six and seven percent, the leap to double figures occurred in 1983 , but it was only in 2008 that the threshold of twenty percent was exceeded to reach thirty-six today. It has never happened that so many Italians were missing from the polls: but what else was missing in this electoral round?
For example, some themes were missing. The first of these is that of inequality: of income, employment and work, access to services (school, health, transport), housing, social promotion, political participation indeed. Already in 2020 the first annual report on social mobility prepared by the World Economic Forum (available at the page https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report.pdf) placed Italy at the bottom of the main industrialized countries for social mobility. If Denmark scored eighty-five points of Global Social Mobility Index – a measure of five different dimensions determining social mobility: health, education (access, quality and equity), technology, work (opportunity, wages, condition), social protection and inclusive institutions – and whether it was followed by Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland, while Germany was the first among the G7 economies (eleventh), Italy with a score of sixty-seven was relegated to thirty-fourth place, preceded by Portugal, twenty-fourth, and Spain, twenty-eighth. Our country had achieved a decidedly positive peak in the area of health, mainly thanks to life expectancy and in part to the quality and access to health services, but it was heavily lacking in terms of ‘social diversity’ within the system of education, which evidently does not know how to promote inclusion among different classes.
Let us then extend our gaze to the mood of our society: in 2018, in its Annual Report on the Italian social situation, CENSIS portrayed a people in the throes of nastinessa condition described as psychic sovereignty. Unease, resentment, social immobilism have so disappointed expectations as to cause a malice that runs through our life together, unfolding a latent and nebulized conflict, in search of a scapegoat. The early elections shortened the legislature – among the most rhapsodic and alienating in republican history – by only a few months but, judging by how the campaign was conducted, they seem to have taken political actors almost by surprise. Excluding those movements and parties that have registered the usual passwords, more useful than ever under the August sun for a simplified invocation of identity, the PD has preferred to base its communication on decidedly twentieth-century binary schemes: the red and black, pro o contrahere or there. As if the complexity of the contemporary, objectively even less digestible during the summer holidays, could be replaced by the call to a resistance of yesteryearto an almost anthropological or at least cultural superiority in tune with the reasons – mind you: all more than commendable – of medically assisted suicide, of right schoolof equal marriage. As it happens, however, these are individual rights, albeit with undeniable and beneficial collective effects, civil rights, rights on which it is difficult to bring together a majority but which is easy to tell. When, finally, a difficult story? A change of secretariat will certainly not be enough to have it.
Note. Even the appeal to defend the Constitution responds to a certain political automatism. I fear, however, that it does more harm than good to our Fundamental Law: as long as someone takes the role of protector of the Constitution, in fact, it cannot really be said to belong to everyone and even less can it foster an authentically widespread and transversal constitutional patriotism.