The taxi drivers’ protest in Rome
Taxi/ On the eve of the election of the new European Parliament, the issue of competition (or its denial) should be a decisive and qualifying issue. Comment
I don’t have it with me taxi drivers; neither with those of Milan, nor with those of Rome. I’m angry with a country that doesn’t accept competition and suffers blackmail from a category that has its own needs, which unfortunately do not coincide with the priorities of resident citizens, as well as those of traveling citizens. And God knows how hospitable we should be to tourists.
I’m not even convinced by the popular belief that the mayors of big cities are hostages of a category capable of bringing local transport to its knees.. If the concessionaire becomes stronger than the person putting the concession up for tender, it means that we have fallen into an irreparable crisis that distances us from the entire civilized world. In Europe Uber is everywhere, both where it is peacefully declared legal (as in Great Britain) and where it is tolerated in a limbo of law that does not avoid the service (from Holland to Germany).
We don’t discover that there is a problem with competition in Italy today. And not just on the taxi drivers front. The age-old issue of beach licenses demonstrates an inability to address and resolve an issue that makes us unique in Europe, despite the ultimatum launched to the Municipalities by the highest body of Italian administrative justice, the Council of State. The conflict over maritime state concessions is naturally entirely political, rather than economic and legal. And it concerns the consensus of an important part of the tourism sector, which employs tens of thousands of people in Italy and involves, according to Unioncamere, 6,823 establishments, responsible for 29,689 concessions.
If Marco Bentivogli declares to Corriere della Sera that “a few thousand taxi drivers have more political weight than industrial workers” it means that representation and representativeness have gone haywire and that the institutions are not able to manage the problems, and prefer to become followers: it is not enough to recall the decline of leadership to the full advantage of followership, there is an inability to create the conditions of common life.
And there isn’t even a clear political enemy. The directive Bolkestein – the one that should remove the monopoly of beach licenses – has in fact been opposed, held back, disregarded by all the governments that have followed one another in recent years in Italy. It is not just a problem of the right, which champions the income of the current concessionaires. Just as “left-wing” mayors cannot be acquitted – in Milan as in Rome – because they do not know how to oppose the excessive power of taxi driverswho after the “strike” of May 21st return to protest on the eve of the European vote: on June 5th and 6th (with the sole exception of a trade union which dissociated itself from yet another blockade in the cities).
The “Financial Times” headlined: “Italian cabbies fight reforms”. How can you blame him? But above all, how can we tolerate that no one defends those reforms that should make us feel a little more European? Not because all Europeanism is good and necessary, but because we often want to see ourselves reflected in the habits and freedoms manifested beyond the Alps, when we feel all the suffocation of what happens on this side of the mountain range.
On the eve of the election of the new European Parliament, the issue of competition (or its denial) should be a decisive and qualifying issue. But I don’t think I’ve heard clear words in this election campaign. Above all, we shouldn’t give in to the response of a taxi driver who, faced with the sacrosanct complaint of a user exhausted by waiting in line for over half an hour at the Termini station in Rome, arrogantly replies: “Why, you at the post office don’t do you get in line and wait?”.
#elections #Italy #held #hostage #taxis #politics #silent #competition
