The return of the Provinces? A simple copy-paste would really be a crime – Corriere.it

“Is it so hard to be serious?” Almost twelve years after Pier Ferdinando Casini’s outburst on Facebook, fed up with the indecorous ballet on the cut of about thirty Provinces and convinced that the government should “make an act of seriousness by abolishing them all”, it is worth asking the question again. The idea of ​​returning to the Provinces of the past, complete with universal suffrage, election of presidents and councilors and all the rest including tokens, as it seems from the various proposals of the government majority, in fact remains hanging from the ceiling like a caciocavallo from the old crust.

Then? The skills they had over so much of the road network, schools and the environment? Employees who have been transferred for years (earning more) to Regions, ministries, courts or employment centres? The buildings, the furniture, the computers and the rest? Everything as before like in the old black and white cinema films where you saw the films rewind and the little men walk backwards to the sound of the barrel organ? And the reorganization of the administrative machinery which has gradually expanded and pulverized as already denounced by the 2018 Report of the Court of Auditors on “the bodies participated by the local authorities” to the point of counting “over 7,700” companies, bodies, consortia and so on with a total of about 356,000 employees with the result that “3,805 of these instrumental bodies (more than half) employ fewer than 5 workers” and “in 1,800 cases a number of workers equal to 0”?

“God, what a mess!” someone will horrify. But that’s the way it is, the Istat census of public administrations already explained five years ago, registering 1,581 regional and local instrumental bodies: 152 mountain communities; 572 Unions of Municipalities; 54 businesses, institutions and companies for tourism; 11 regional employment agencies and companies; 44 regional agencies for the environment and training; 15 regional agencies for agricultural development and the disbursement of subsidies in agriculture; 107 government bodies of water and/or waste services (ex Aato)…». Go on? Maybe it were enough to restore the old Provinces, with their load of management “elected by the people” but also of clientele, scandals, waste (grand pianos costing 120,000 euros for the Reggio representative salon, trips to Columbus Day in New York with five provincial delegations from Campania at a cost of 50,000 euros each…) to tidy up the chaos. It’s not by rewinding the tape that everything will magically settle down like Cinderella’s dress waiting for the ball under the magical touch of the fairy Forgetful.

And that fairy should restore some memory to those who on the eve of August 15th 2011 wanted to hastily give a signal to the furious Italians over the costs of (bad) politics. The premier was Silvio Berlusconi (“I’m not talking about the provinces because they must be eliminated”), Roberto Calderoli was at Simplification, Giorgia Meloni at Youth, Giulio Tremonti at Economics, Ignazio La Russa at Defense with a weighty undersecretary, Guido Crosetto, who supported the need to «eliminate all the Provinces, without touching the small Municipalities that remain a “social garrison” useful to the citizens, while it would be necessary to halve the number of MPs» and so on. All lined up today among the parties who want the return of what many then called “old bandwagons”.

“I would like to recall that the League was the only party to vote against the abolition of the Provinces, also paying an electoral price: today all phenomena to say that if there had been the Provinces they would have cleaned up the streets”, said Matteo six years ago Salvini, who had just been elected secretary at the end of 2013 had fought for “the abolition of the prefects, a symbol of occupation by a thieving state on the verge of bankruptcy”. However, it remains Padania of that mid-August, with a big headline that read: «La Casta smitten in the heart. Calderoli: cut 50,000 seats». Even more triumphant was the declaration to ANSA by the current Minister for Regional Affairs: «At the beginning of this legislature there were 140,000 administrators of Regions, Provinces and Municipalities and with the various interventions, including today’s manoeuvre, at the conclusion of the electoral renewals we will go from 140,000 to 53,000 with a reduction of 87,000″. boom!

The trouble is that the step forward towards a greater awareness of the need to make cuts and initiate profound reforms in central and peripheral public organization, a step forward recognized in this sense even by historical adversaries such as Eugenio Scalfari, did not face head-on, giving perhaps the thing taken for granted, a fundamental theme: if the Provinces were removed, who would have taken charge of its competences? And the question remained there, hanging, even after the attempted reorganization immediately attempted by the Monti government but rejected in July 2013 by the Consulta: radically transforming the nature and functioning of a territorial entity such as the Provinces could not be done by decree. Just as, the following year, Graziano Delrio’s reform set out to fail as he tried to bring order to the powers (keeping the Provinces alive only as “second-degree bodies”) but it was immediately crippled by the government of Matteo Renzi (also hostile to the provincial entities: “The real savings is to abolish them all”) and by its 2015 and 2016 financials marked by cuts so drastic as to be denounced by the president (dem) of the Upi Achille Variati and by the same Court of Auditors as “manifestly unreasonable”. To the point of effectively preventing a minimum of maintenance of over 5,000 schools and 130,000 kilometers of roads. What’s more: everything was linked to Renzi’s constitutional reform rejected in the December 2016 referendum.

All upstream. All to be redone. With the usual ambiguities. Suffice it to recall that the same contract signed in 2018 between Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio to form the yellow-green government, which theoretically could have relaunched the Northern League battle continually heralded by the leader of the Carroccio, did not even contain a citation, in 17,964 words (almost double those used by Marx and Engels to write the “Communist Manifesto”) of the coveted Provinces. I miss one. Just a nod to that of Treviso taken as an example for waste management.

And there we go back: it is to be trusted that a new version of the old provinces desired by an apparently compact right (including Silvio Berlusconi, through the mouth of the force group leader Licia Ronzulli) can find a wise and correct mediation around a theme like this that has so far seen too many stretches, such as for example the doubling from four to eight of the Sardinian provinces including that of Ogliastra with capitals such as Tortolì and Lanusei, just over five thousand inhabitants? And is it really possible that this mediation could also have the green light of a part of the current opposition? We will see. What is certain is that the copy paste restoration of a past experience that did not leave a good memory would really be a crime.