Italian Politics Thread - Movimento 0/5 Stelle

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Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

Love Italy but am confused by it. Please post more about the batshit electoral system and my favorite region (Liguria)

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 11:57

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:28

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

Char posted:

After turning into a single country, no Italian government except for the fascist regime tried to give the whole population a foundation of values, ideals, minimum guaranteed services, and so on. Before globalization, the stratified vision of groups was easy to decipher:
If you're from my street, you're a friend.
If you're from a different part of town, you're a rival.
If you're from the outskirts, you're an ignorant peasant who should pay the taxes to benefit my services.
If you're from a nearby town, you're my economic competitor.
If you're from another region, you're a foreigner, which means I'll have to refer to the notorious stereotypes regarding your region to communicate with you.
If you're from another country, well, you're a foreigner as well, but you don't even speak my language and your stereotypes are even broader, and built on past history your country has with mine.
(oh, and if you're from Pisa... well. You know. Everywhere in the world, some expat or tourist has written somewhere "Pisa Merda". It's one of our oldest proto-meme.)

Then globalization hits and your stratified vision of outgroups is outdated, because there's this huge void: foreigners whose history you know nothing about that end up living in your street. Everything in your model is messed up, friends end up going abroad, the outskirts become the cradle of the new middle class, your economic competitors shut down and you start wondering if you're next on the chopping block, you name it.

It's a bit roundabout way to say that the average Italian still has a mindset where the foreigner is everyone born outside your 20km radius of existance, and no government managed to alter, much less break, this way of thinking.

This is very interesting and it actually kind of sort of clarifies something I�ve always found extremely baffling and troubling, namely the fact that the Italian football authorities seem to punish �regional discrimination� more harshly than actual racism. Apart from the FIGC probably being a bunch of racists themselves, this could also be viewed as a reaction to a perceived lack of homogeneity and social cohesion in a country that doesn�t really want to be a country, so a northerner chanting something offensive about dirty terroni can come to be viewed as a worse threat than a football fan who throws a banana peel at a black player. Supremely weird and interesting.

How does the failure of an emotional integration of the country square with the fact that literally every village, town and city has a Via Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi, though? And are there significant differences as to how Garibaldi and Cavour, the other main architect of unification, are perceived? Like, I�d assume the Lega hates Garibaldi because they (secretly?) consider the creation of a unified Italy that includes all those drat southerners a mistake, right? But when I visited Apulia last summer I didn�t get the impression that he was particularly well liked in the south either.

Finally, how the gently caress is your pizza always so loving good? There�s not a single restaurant here in my lovely Swiss hometown that serves actual Italian pizza, it's all disgusting cheesified poo poo

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 15:07

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

I visited the city of Taranto last summer and read up on its history on Wikipedia and it just blew my loving mind that this level of pollution and environmental destruction was allowed to happen. And of course the corporation that owned all the polluting steel plants and the like - ILVA - and was criminally lax in handling environmental protection measures leading to thousands of deaths hails from the north. When I read about these stats and saw the dilapidated old town I sort of understood for the first time why a person from the south might hate the rich northerners.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 19:40

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

mortons stork posted:

I'm actually from the place, unuckily, and can shed some light into what went on with ILVA. Basically, it was an off-site steel plant of a giant state-owned steel corp (Italsider) which set up shop a long while ago and made Taranto one of the richest industrial cities in the South. Now, this being giant heavy industry, it fostered a lot of growth for supporting industries as well, so the city, which also was gifted with a fairly important commercial harbor, also became host to petroleum refineries, a regional hub for the energy which was needed to fuel the giant plant which is as large as the entire city itself basically. Pollution doesn't really come into the picture because we're talking periods of time where nobody gives a gently caress, plus everyone is getting rich and working class people in Taranto are actually among the most well off in the South, to the point where there is significant migration from neighbouring regions.

Over time concerns over pollution start to grow in the North, so Italsider slowly shuts down its plants in Northern Italy and brings the blast furnaces down to Taranto, where nobody still gives a gently caress about the environment. The end result is that, by the 90s, Taranto has the largest steel plant in Europe. Fast forward a bit, the entire corp is sold for a pittance to political cronies in the era of privatization. The industrial city was already declining but here it just nosedives, the private management stops buying their supplies from the neighbouring plants, instead privileging other sources they could secure better deals with. Supporting industries just loving die, and Taranto is left with the horrifying pollution of the steel plant and the refineries. Plus the private owners start crushing the trade unions until only one is left, one that is actually fostered and organized by the company itself. Now being ILVA-employed pays only a little more than low-skill job anywhere else on the planet. At the same time, the plant owners use the fact that they employ some 12k people to successfully lobby the weak devolved regional governments to turn a blind eye on the pollution and on the lack of measures being taken to address it, despite being contractually obliged basically since the sale to install filters and underground coke storage and such. This continues, funnily enough, not only under the insanely corrupt right wing regional governments but also under the two terms of ecologist party government that came afterwards. Anytime ILVA is threatened with sanctions for its pollution, it just waves its 12k employed 'at risk' of losing their jobs, has its company-sponsored union organize a march through the center, and authorities relent. To put into context why the lobbying is so successful, we're talking 'large employer in a 20% structural unemployment rate region." Youth unemployment is around 40%.

More recently, the owners of the company were finally arrested for their rampant corruption, and the state briefly took over, on the assumption that it would undertake the production modernizations that ILVA hadn't done, and invest significantly in order to reduce pollution. What actually happened is that the state did none of that, while emitting law decrees that essentially made Taranto into a special production zone where environmental laws do not apply, increasing pollution limits to such levels that even ILVA with its 20+ year old production facilities could run basically undisturbed. Fast forward to our days, the company was auctioned off to another global steel conglomerate, which promised investments into pollution reduction and modernization of facilities, but as a first step laid off 2k employees. Prospects look bleak.

The short of it is, Taranto has been failed spectacularly by just about all of the political forces in the country. The 5-star movement won the city in the general election on a platform of shutting down ILVA, and instead got it sold off to a global steel corporation with a not-so-stellar record on employment and got 2k layoffs just off the bat. But the left-wing ecologists didn't do that much better either, and the right, well, was the right.

Thank you so much for this brilliant post; it sheds light on many things I observed there and could only read about on Wikipedia and various English-speaking news sources. My visit to Taranto kind of broke my heart, because everyone I encountered was really friendly and the food was awesome, but I just couldn't help but find the place incredibly depressing

So much potential there, too!

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 21:43

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

Basically this, then: https://www.courthousenews.com/dirty-steelworks-in-city-of-the-dead-tests-italys-new-rulers-promises/

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 22:27

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

You should at least throw in some Italian swear words and occasionally offer literal translations of memes, it's what works in the Germany thread!

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 23:15

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:28

Wengy: Feb 6, 2008

Leoluca Orlando gave an interview to my local Swiss paper today and that man is an absolute hero.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2019 21:22

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