Against Salvini, against Conte

Submitted by AWL on 11 September, 2019 - 11:34 Author: Hugh Edwards
conte

Italy’s new government won its vote of confidence in parliament on 9 September.

The Democratic Party (PD) of Nicola Zingaretti monopolises all of the principal offices articulating relations with Italian and European “big” capital and with the apparatus of the state — defence, economy, infrastructure, agriculture.

The Five Star Movement (M5S) occupies those it already had in the preceeding governmental alliance with Salvini’s Lega, justice, labour, environment, and gains education and the Foreign Office.

The “left” Free and Equal Party (LeU) got the Ministry of Health, so this abject orphan has dutifully returned to its PD home.

The PD’s allies here have the task of managing ministries “at the coal face”, of offering crumbs here and there to sustain the government, helped the collaboration of a trade union officialdom, craven before the bosses and their state, which has been impotent as the gangrene of racism has devoured the pores and sinews of class solidarity all along the peninsula.

This government is preserving the dirty work of its predecessors. The Salvini-inspired and murderously racist security laws will be barely reformed.

An undertaking to preserve the equilibrium of the public finances signals the prolongation of the regime of austerity. The ecstatic response from other European Community leaders to the birth of the new government may signal a willingness to ease the pressure on the Italians.But the margins of manoeuvre are very tight in the present and worsening climate of economic stagnation.

The new minister of education has already declared that any new money for the already long-disintegrating public education system will not come from public expenditure, and has announced the taxation of children’s school snacks.

At the same time the government plans new tax cuts for the rich, and new incentives for profits.

The satisfaction of the world of finance and capital with the government has a clear material base.

But the satisfaction of those who claim to represent the Italian left, who claim to speak in the name of and for the working masses? LeU has been only too happy to return to base, once more, to offer service.

Sinistra Italiana announces its “vote of confidence” in the “turn”.

Rifondazione states, truthfully, “this is not our government”. Whose, then? No answer.

Thus the so called radical left drifts impotently while the Salvini-led Right launches itself against “the government of the Communists and the extreme Left”.

The effective silence and collective inaction of the Italian left and trade union movement as a rising tide of racism swept the country with the ascent of Salvini underlines the price to be paid when the monopoly of opposition and political space is handed to our most dangerous enemies.

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