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Rating: All the bells ring in heaven
above the Carroccio. It is the city that departs:
it departs lifting a slow aerial chant
with all its towers.
(Giovanni Pascoli, "The Song of the Carroccio", 1908-09)
The book
This is a book by young Tuscan journalist Paolo Stefanini (1980), presented by Enrico Deaglio, which thoughtfully and concernedly reflects on the rise of the Lega Nord in Emilia-Romagna, before the recent regional elections that have indeed consecrated, for the first time in recent Italian history, the significant electoral advance of the Carroccio south of the Po (also in Tuscany and Marche).
The book's premise is that in these lands, the Lega is, with an effective metaphor, a "watermelon", green outside and red inside, that is, a left-wing movement behind all appearances, and that Bossi can even be considered a new Berlinguer.
Statements of this kind must, of course, be contextualized and analyzed over the long term: this does not negate that the Lega Nord confirms a post-ideological character that does not allow it to be easily explained by the political categories used for the parties of the 20th century, being a socially transversal movement, both right and left together.
Paranoid Emilia?
De Lorenzo's comment
Many courteous users - whom I obviously thank - have written to me privately asking me to intervene on DeBaser, even with an editorial, to comment on the outcomes of the recent regional electoral round, teasing me with rather acute observations about my ability to foresee the future; particularly hinting at a previous essay of mine from the summer of 2009 - in which I actually anticipated the possible affirmation of the Lega Nord in Veneto and especially Piedmont - and the further piece from January 2010, dedicated to Mara Carfagna and the female question, underestimated by some users but not by the tens of thousands of Campania voters who rewarded the Minister of Equal Opportunities with an enormous amount of votes (over 55,000), confirming this young woman's undeniable political skills.
I would refrain, on this occasion, from returning to the "Carfagna case", about which I think I have already clarified my position in unsuspected times, rather dealing with the Lega Nord and its political breakthrough in a region once considered an impregnable territory of the left, like Emilia-Romagna: I think you all know these areas, both its beaches and its no less intriguing hinterland.
A land difficult to dissect, Emilia-Romagna, in which different souls coexist, having over the decades reached a wonderful synthesis in the local political model: I am thinking of the socialist-leaning matrix of a Pascoli of "La grande proletaria si è mossa", which was then transfused to the young Mussolini from Predappio before reaching the broader totalitarian conceptions of Fascism (in which corporate echoes repeated the ancient reflections matured at the foot of the Apennines) and reached definitive democratic maturity in the life and works of a Nenni; to the communist dimension of the Emilian hinterland, with Reggio-Emilia as its epicenter, where the PCI garnered remarkable consensus, reaching "Bulgarian" majorities and proposing cultural and economic development models similar to those applied by the USSR in the Comecon countries; not to mention the strong influences of Padani Catholicism, often reformist and devoid of subjection to the most conservative tendencies of the curia - especially Bolognese (let's think especially of a Cardinal Biffi) - expressed by figures of primary importance like Don Giuseppe Dossetti and the think tank that reflected his teachings for decades, as evidenced by the political and cultural activities of Beniamino Andreatta or Romano Prodi.
From whatever angle one wishes to interpret Emilian-Romagna politics, and the paradigm - I would almost say the "myth", the "mythopoeia" or perhaps "narration" as Vendola might like - that emerged from it, I think I can summarize its characteristics and soul in a deep sense of solidarity, almost a common denominator between socialism, communism, and the Catholicism of social commitment: a sense of solidarity by which the public sphere and public power became instruments of social service in favor of the entire population, obviously starting with disadvantaged groups, and eventually touching even the wealthier classes under the banner of a common ideological koinè in which productive and working classes were united under common banners and standards, under the banner of progress whose contours were unclear, but whose concrete benefits were perceived in a time of abundance and magnificent progressive destinies typical of the Italian miracle and Fordism.
As everyone knows, however, such a picture, reassuring in certain aspects, seems to have been broken in recent years, in which the old social-Catho-communist consensus seems to have been replaced, even in these lands, by the strong assertion of the Lega Nord, representing the concerns and protests of a social body that finds itself stripped of guarantees and, above all, solid economic and social prospects.
Here, I would like to open a parenthesis, which perhaps brings me closer to the site's average user, thanks also to the valuable suggestions of some friends whom I asked for help in updating my language and becoming more in tune with the young world, compared to the actual older age of the writer: the collapse of the old system, in some ways consecrated by songwriters like F. Guccini or P.A. Bertoli in the 70s, not to mention the tiresome B. Bertolucci of "1900", was foreseen by some artists who are said to be quite popular among the young, like, in the 80s and 90s, the CCCP and the CSI of Catholic intellectual Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, who perhaps more than others managed to expose the provincialism of Emilian communism and its expressionist, if not kitsch and post-ideological sides, ultimately significant as "signifiers" (i.e., slogan-like), but not as having any political "meaning"; more recently, by a group like the Offlaga Disco Pax, which has effectively highlighted the progressive decay of the pseudo-communist ideals in a fundamentally consumerist society like Emilia, where, similar to the rest of Italy, the individual seems primarily devoted to pursuing personal well-being - according to utilitarian schemes of Bentham or Mill - accepting only later to distribute any productive surpluses with their neighbor.
Here lies, in fact, the focal point of the problem, and in my humble opinion, the explanation for the recent electoral results: social-communism imbued with Emilian Catholicism can function only under the condition that the economic fabric allows for channeling votes towards neo-corporative forms of management of widespread well-being, but it enters a radical crisis in times of economic hardship and social fear - for example, due to massive immigration, the assault on cities by non-EU citizens and the like, the growth of drug trafficking and trade conducted by the usual suspects - in which the vote is channeled toward political formations with a more straightforward, direct message, and the ability to read the world as it is, and not as one would like it to be, based on an ideal, "Pascolian" filter, not to say naive and fable-like, such as that of the Emilia left: Pascolian and naive aspects that, if you get the chance - emerge clearly in songs like "Little Petersburg" or "Cinnamon", but also "Where did I put my sweater?", by the aforementioned Offlaga Disco Pax.
On further thought, there is nothing to be surprised about: if, in fact, we use the lenses of Marxian thinking to explain the phenomenon, it can easily be understood how an economic collapse (the closure of factories, crisis of historic centers due to high rents and the arrival of non-EU citizens taking employment and social spaces, increase in Italian and foreign crime due to the productive and employment crisis) inevitably corresponded to an ideological collapse, being, in some respects, the political model of those lands superstructural over the social economic fabric of a land rich in individual ingenuity and fertile like the Emilian-Romagna countryside.
In this perspective, however, I do not agree with either the chants of woe foreseeing the disappearance of the Emilian-Romagna model, nor with those who see in the neo-Leghism of these lands a fracture or a backward step from the tenets of left-wing thought: not so much in the sense, even advocated by Massimo D'Alema in the 90s, that the Lega is a "rib of the left", which it undoubtedly is in speaking as equals to workers, salaried employees, small VAT holders, and individuals burdened by poverty; but rather, and above all, in the sense of constituting the last evolution - allow me to say: the fulfillment - of the old Emilian-Romagna thought, reconnecting its dimension to that of the North proper, like Lombardy, Piedmont, and Veneto.
The writer's position, in short, is that it is not the Lega that is a watermelon (green outside and red inside), but that it was the traditional Emilian model that was like an apple (red only outside, and of various colors, still tending towards white, inside).
Consider, in fact, how the glue of the Emilian-Romagna left was the cult and protection of their small homeland - a small ancient world as described by the Offlaga Disco Pax, no less than by Guareschi's "Don Camillo" or Pascoli's "The Songs of King Enzio" - in which the consensus among the Catholic center and the more or less extreme left, especially in provincial and rural centers, was functional, no less than in other areas of Italy, to the preservation of acquired advantages and the maintenance of the status quo, bending social instruments (cooperativism, unionism) to these purposes without any genuine further ideological connotation beyond the cultivation of one's own garden, to use a term of typically Voltairian ancestry.
At the moment when internal and external agents threaten such a small world, such an oasis, such a Pascolian nest, it seems totally obvious to me that the local population would embrace the language and electoral proposals of a Lega Nord that, thanks also to the coherence of its message and the recent missteps of the Emilian left (the Delbono case first and foremost, but let's not forget Unipol: one cannot base a political message on one's moral superiority without truly being so), knows more than any other contemporary political force how to represent the deepest and most rooted needs and impulses of the electorate.
It only remains now to await the future developments of this electoral affirmation, curious to grasp the Emilian-Romagna declination of Leghism: my feeling is that the Lega has simply discovered latent characteristics of that society.
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