Luca Zaia: “As long as young people are the minority of voters, politics will pay little attention to them”

It is not a country for young people
It was nothing but a fruit crate, the banquet we used to set up on the roadside as kids. One of those light wooden ones that can still be seen on the shelves of some today
greengrocers. Just turn it upside down and for us it took the form of a miniature market stall. In the months of the summer holidays together with my friends, staying close to our houses, every now and then along the road we set up this small “business” which was a way to pass the time and allowed us to get some money. Not many, a
tell the truth. In fact, I don’t remember that with the proceeds we ever managed to buy more than a few ice lollies or at most one packaged ice cream, and not even expensive ones…

…Behind our banquet in the shade of a tree we spent hours. Passers-by, all friends and acquaintances, stopped to chat, to observe the goods, and the few
who bought something did it more out of sympathy and solidarity towards us kids who exploited every possible idea to differentiate the game in the free hours of the summer. But
I am convinced that no one made purchases in vain: it was kids like us who bought a toy or a magazine, who spent their pocket money, or parents who would have put
capitalize on that purchase by taking it home to their children. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were pioneers of the circular economy, giving another life and a new use to objects that would otherwise have been thrown away…
…It’s true, a lot of work is done in my land….It is no coincidence that even in 2022, despite the difficulties of a pandemic still in progress and the emergency linked to the war in Europe, the Veneto recorded a growth GDP equal to 3.4 percentage points. But there is no prototype of the Venetian woman and man who work like donkeys because they are genetically programmed to be born and die toiling.
I have often wondered why work is so conditioning in my region. I think that, even before a culture of work, the reasons are to be found in a culture of duty understood not as blind obedience to even a moral law. It is the duty to be self-sufficient, to live without depending on anyone, from whom
the corporate culture was born as a direct consequence…
…Many of these workers have become great entrepreneurs, representatives of a social fabric that has developed beyond all expectations and in any field, designing and giving
substance to a land that today is a model capable of guaranteeing anyone with an idea or a project that they can realize it without having to move elsewhere…

…The generation to which I belong is also the one that threw itself headlong into the world of house music, whose rhythms arrived from the United States together with a great enemy, ecstasy. In many years of work in discos I have never come across drugs and perhaps for this reason I will never be able to associate that plague with the world of the night as much as with society or with individual problems; and after all today discotheques practically no longer exist, while the diffusion of drugs has become pervasive and aggressive. But it is undeniable that drugs have been part of our generational history…

…I like to point out that young people are the good part of society that we are called to administer. Someone will find this statement obvious, but it’s not at all, because everyone talks about young people but it’s politics that risks not being interested in them first. One day, on the sidelines of a public meeting, two boys approached me holding a copy of my book, asking me for a dedication. They were no more than eighteen. We had a chat and they told me they bought the volume because I was one of the few characters
audiences to talk about young people and to do so using both language and content close to and understandable to them. That meeting made me think. I do not deny that I felt satisfaction,
but it prompted me to make a series of considerations, and I concluded that, if a ranking were made of all the topics that animate the days of political news, among the many rivers of
words it would be really hard to find the term “young”. Clearly, as long as young people are the minority of voters, politics will pay little attention to them. But it can’t and it shouldn’t
to be so. With all due respect to the elderly and adults, an age group in which I am of course included, we cannot afford to be a country for old men.

…We can’t think of making them grow by continuing to paint the world as if it were destined to end. They need to live their role in reality until they acquire it
the certainty that the world will not run out, that difficulties do not prevent us from looking ahead and seeing new perspectives. Who benefits from endlessly basking in the idea that it doesn’t exist
future? It’s a wrong idea because it doesn’t take into account an inexorable law: every generation is awaited by its tomorrow.