Andrea MORNIROLI

Co-coordinator of the Forum on Inequalities and Diversity, Italy

A profound authoritarian dynamic runs through, traverses and saps democracy in Italy. The population is assisting in a cultural and political dismantling through a real reversal of public policies that have stopped redistributing wealth through the tax levy on welfare. We need to restore a social dialogue to produce common sense about the idea that doing welfare and producing empowerment is ethically and civically right, and, nevertheless, decisive for economic development.

The signs are clear: democracies are increasingly in crisis. A profound authoritarian dynamic runs through, traverses and saps democracies in Italy, Europe and the world. For Italy, it is a dynamic that has made important inroads. It is the result of the choices and policies of many of the successive governments that, albeit with different densities, have systematically nullified labour protections and rights as well as have fostered a real reversal of public policies which have stopped redistributing wealth through the tax levy on welfare, schooling and health. Finally, this dynamic ended up dismantling one of the cornerstones of the Italian constitution, namely that of considering it as one of the primary responsibilities of the state to guarantee and protect the enforceability of rights. Bending the public function more on economic imperatives than on the rights and care for the collective good. This process has come to the point where today, the mere public ownership of a service or provision does not certify its public function anymore (guaranteeing its universality of access). The public seems to have bowed to the ‘market’ and individualist model in many contexts.

Public policies have been going in this direction for years, and there is no doubt that the government led by Giorgia Meloni has pushed this political and ideological framework further than any of its predecessors. The last government by defining, particularly on welfare issues, first and foremost among which health, a framework based on rejecting any universalist hypothesis, centring it rather on a corporatist, identity-based and paternalist approach. Moreover, the current government is damaging thrust because by rejecting all social dialogue, the method used by the government turns out to be overbearing and vicious toward the weak. And it is precisely the latter who are increasingly poorly served by institutions and public actors, who are more attentive to the ‘centres’ than to the ‘margins’. In recent years, people who have felt abandoned and unrecognised, and therefore are angry and resentful of politics, fall for the allure of those who propose authoritarian turns and easy enemies to lash out at.

Among the various areas where all basic services of universal welfare corroded, the severe shrinkage suffered by the national health system is particularly stark in Italy. Policies favouring privatisation and aiming to offload many care tasks onto the family have dismantled the very idea of care. Public intervention has shifted from a logic of inclusion and a collective and public responsibility perspective to containment and institutionalisation. People are seen as receivers of benefits rather than subjects with a voice, co-decision-makers and co-producers of policies. The universalism of rights is undermined by residual, categorical responses and a return to welfare for a few. In addition, social work, under normal conditions a primary good for the community implementing the basic conditions for a life of dignity, is increasingly devalued.

Even before the economic one, the cultural and political dismantling had been prepared and nurtured by an invasive narrative, often based on simplifications and instrumental representations of reality. This has changed the country’s common sense, turning the poor into culprits for their condition to the point of absurdity: the problem no longer seems to be poverty, but how to treat the poor. Hardship is criminalised, and the weak lose humanity. They are narrated no longer as individuals, but as negatively represented categories. This clears the way for indifference and resentment toward them. Inequality has become ‘normal’, where the private is seen as always better than the public. Merit is proposed only as the accumulation of wealth and not as the fruit of people’s abilities and investments. Moreover, with the current discussion of the law on differentiated autonomy, the authoritarian drift comes to completion. This law widens the gaps that split the country (and that have been preventing its growth for years) and favours the processes of privatisation of services and the debasement of public intervention into a mere function of containment and institutionalisation of all the hardships and frailties, which should not be left to the market regulation or dumped on families.

Given the current situation, a radical change is urgent, and a horizontal alliance that supports it needs to be built, which takes into account all the actors involved and the complexity of the contexts. In addition, welfare and policies to combat poverty and inequality need to be thought of as prerequisites and not outcomes of development. Welfare is not a corollary of the policies that matter but needs to be conceived as a cross-cutting look through all areas of the economy and society at large.

Welfare, therefore, means working for the collective human development of the whole community. Consistently, we need to build an alternative narrative to the dominant one built around the idea that welfare can only be guaranteed through the removal and containment of ever larger masses of the excluded and marginalised. It needs to be made clear that welfare and producing empowerment are ethically and civically right, often cost-effective, and decisive for economic development.

Photo credits: Shutterstock.com/Delbo Andrea