Matteo Renzi in Florence, Italy on January 4th, 2014. Photograph by Laura Lezza/Getty.
We studiously avoid politics on these pages, but we studiously make occasional exceptions like this one. After an undeservedly long stretch of time, decades that became generations, of Italy in political turmoil this may be a moment of, dare we say it, change we can believe in. Alexander Stille provides a pithy summary of why this is so on the New Yorker website.
Leave ideology out of the consideration, if possible, and observe the new Prime Minister’s focus on community and collaboration; and the bicycle; one more reason to visit Italy this year as a show of support for his vision for change and his vehicular choices:
Sixty-three governments in sixty-eight years, with twenty-seven different Prime Ministers—so why should we care that Italy has a new government, with yet another Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi? It is understandable if observers find the dizzying nature of Italian politics exhausting and pointless. It can seem like a merry-go-round: the people on the painted horses change, but when the music stops we are in the same place. In the past twenty years, Italy’s problems have remained depressingly familiar: a stagnating economy, an enormous national debt, high unemployment, a large, inefficient bureaucracy, and a political and educational system that discourages initiative, innovation, merit, and opportunity.
And yet there are reasons to believe that Renzi, the leader of the center-left Democratic Party, will prove to be one of the more intriguing and long-lasting figures in Italian politics. At thirty-nine, he is the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history—younger even, by a couple of months, than the young Benito Mussolini when he was asked to form a government in the wake of his March on Rome, in 1922. Renzi’s youth matters because Italy is a country that has devolved into a gerontocracy: positions of power are occupied by men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, while youth unemployment is above forty per cent. The job market is bifurcated between extraordinarily well-protected older workers who cannot be fired and younger people working on “precarious” temporary contracts, often making about a thousand euros (less than fourteen hundred dollars) a month. An astonishing percentage of young people live at home well into their thirties, waiting for a full-time job and the opportunity to marry. The most ambitious and energetic seek their fortunes overseas—in the U.K., France, or the United States. American universities are filled with brilliant young Italian academics who find it easier to break into the U.S. system than that of their own country, which functions, much like the country’s political system, according to the principles of cronyism, nepotism and seniority.
Renzi has the appeal of a young Bill Clinton or Tony Blair—smart, quick on his feet, and adept and well-prepared in public debate. His standard outfit is a plain white shirt, a tie, and a blazer; he looks a bit like a former choirboy, or a college athlete who has dressed up for a job interview. In 2009, when he was thirty-four, he was elected mayor of Florence, his native city. As mayor, he rode a bicycle to get around the city and drove his own car, even after becoming head of the Democratic Party. He has the brashness of someone who does not intend to wait in line, and he expresses the urgency of many younger Italians who fear that their generation’s hopes will be wasted. While still a new mayor, with only a local base of power, he insisted that Italy’s parties needed a rottomazione—a demolition plan…
Rad the whole post here.
Organikos 