Italy: the listing ship

 

Italy: the listing ship

We have had the new Prime Minister for about a week now, albeit still waiting for the confidence vote, and I realized talking and interacting with “them forringers” that Italy is still quite misunderstood. Really, it's one of the reasons for this blog, closely linked with my passive-aggressive rage at thinking that down the road, the same people destroying my country would absolve themselves publicly saying “Who could have seen that coming?”.

So, while I hope that our new government proves to be able to redress our trouble and set Italy on a path of recovery, It is useful to give what my frame of reference is to interpret Italy's story so far.

Imagine, if you will, a tall ship, similar to the Cutty Sark currently displayed at Greenwich.1

At some point, going towards the Cape of Good Hope en route to the UK, you spring a leak. You start listing to port, but as long as the ship is underway briskly and not too much water has entered the bilge, you are still good, perhaps slower but not at risk.

Then, you do not try to plug the leak.

Italy's problems go far back, at least over two decades, when the powers that be decided that the basic contracts between themselves was this: we will trade economic growth away in return for political power and stability.

At first, no sailor or passenger outside the Bridge knows of that choice: it's a sailing ship so it lists anyway, the pace is brisk, smiles all around, and no one cares if the other ships seem to go faster, lots of water left. But if you keep that up for a long time, you start to sit low in the water, sag to leeward, go slower2. Smiles are the first to go away, and even before Covid, you could see them go. Especially as you see the Captain throwing bales overboard to keep the ship going.

So, after all this has been going on for a long time, enters a new Captain... Allow me to wish him (and me) good luck. But initial moves have been quite circumspect, given how grave the economic situation looks going forward. Are we seriously putting CO2 first and economy second, or could we trade a standstill agreement on further environmental and bureaucratic costs to private enterprises until we reach pre COVID GDP levels? After all, those models were predicated on the economy NOT tanking as it has done. What kind of tradeoffs are we prepared to accept?

It seems to me that we will not get answers unless and until we are prepared to ask uneasy questions. And so far, in over a week, I have heard practically none. Assumptions, be they implicit or explicit, still go unchallenged, which in my mind means that COVID is not the crisis that will bring sanity to my poor country. And I dread to think what would.

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