Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

The government cancels funds intended for threatened administrators

The government's choice to cancel funds intended for threatened administrators and public works in entities dissolved by the mafia is a worrying message

Alberto Vannucci Professor of Political Science, University of Pisa

What is politics, the object of almost universal discredit in these times? A classic definition, offered by the American political scientist David Easton, identifies its essence in the ability to carry out an authoritative allocation of values. Whoever governs, in other words, exercises the power to decide what has weight and relevance in society, distributing resources of both a material and symbolic nature. And ultimately, he will be able to assert that power even by resorting to violence: the potential brutality of the command is diluted into a more reassuring form of authority only when it acquires - through various ways - the legitimacy of the citizens.

Read the "Middle Worlds" column and Alberto Vannucci's articles

The 2025 budget law

This summary of decades of sociological reflection serves as an introduction to a small note on the political contortions with which the government and the majority that supports it manage the annual supreme phase of allocation of values, the quintessence of the affirmation of their political power: the 2025 budget law. We know the worst aspects that accompany the process of the measure, the tens of thousands of amendments aimed at giving a few tips to one's own micro or macro-clientele of reference, so to be converted into votes at the first available electoral round. The chosen few - see the 1,500 euro voucher for those who enroll their children in private schools - are usually selectively identified among the most sympathetic categories, or easily oriented towards the centre-right, as is obvious.

However, the government's proposal to cancel the fund for the maintenance of public works in local authorities dissolved by the mafia and to drastically cut (reducing it to a sixth) the fund intended for local administrators who are victims of mafia threats and intimidation went almost unnoticed. The provision is the sign of a worrying reversal compared to the value that politics - in its Melonian declination - recognizes in the anti-mafia commitment.

The strange case of Corigliano Rossano

Administrators under fire

Yet the mapping of acts of violent intimidation suffered by local administrators in Italy, drawn up every year by Notice Public in the report Administrators under fire, reports a worrying scenario: 315 acts of intimidation, threats and violence in 2023, one every 28 hours, for the first time the most affected region is Calabria, with 51 episodes. In a calculation of violence against politicians in Europe, Italy records 51 acts, ranking second only to France. Of course, these are intimidations of various types, not just criminal and mafia-type ones. But is a few cents of consensus extracted from one's customers really worth the signal of anti-mafia disengagement, the loss of authority, the consequent negative value transmitted to civil society?

From lavialibera n° 30, Nobody can judge me