We tell each other every time but then we never change the habit. The we concerns all journalists, politicians and above all the voters, those to whom our little world of what a great journalist more than 60 years ago called “fifteen hundred readers” is addressed. And so we did that magnificent simplification this time too, which saw TV, radio, newspapers and above all social media declaim above all the victory of the center-left in this extraordinary electoral round, the second in the pandemic era after last year. The news is striking above all in the provincial capitals and a little less in the overall result of the elections in the medium and small municipalities. But above all news that with the percentages it risks covering the main front page one on the future as well as on the past.
The the real winner of the 2021 administrative elections is the Prime Minister Mario Draghi. More than one in six citizens from North to South were called to vote throughout Italy and the first party both in the first and (even more, as always) in the ballot was abstention. A party that is not a case of destiny or even of the pandemic but that was born from afar. And above all a majority party in Italy that opens a prairie to the Prime Minister, for two equal and complementary reasons. In the first place, the non-vote indicates a prevailing disappointment without distinction with respect to the entire political offer existing in Italy and therefore a support (confirmed by the polls as well as indirectly by the vote) to a Premier who is not political and who wants to remain so and who nor (unlike Monti) does it show signs of wanting to transform into a party leader.
A perfect Premier for a majority Italy fleeing from the adhesion of both faith and opinion from the parties and also from their more or less civic candidates. Second place abstention says a lot of the real consensus in the country of all the alternatives in the field today also for the next political elections, with a scenario that is essentially returning to bipolar. Two poles, center-right against center-left and a five-star movement, which in any case do not attract more than 50% of the voters and with a coalition that wins more in large cities and the other that (especially in the North) wins more in medium and small municipalities . Due to this mutual weakness, the short-term electoral scenario is absolutely dangerous for both, because with the natural growth of the vote, however, with the political elections, the indications of the 2021 voters do not guarantee a favorable position for anyone.
And both coalitions need a long journey of about 18 months (if that’s enough), until the natural expiry of the parliamentary legislature born in March 2018, to build something different from the sum of the parties and movements that was presented in these administrative offices. Both need to be transformed into a compact team and with a unified project, because the algebraic operations that aggregate different parties and leaders who turn or compete on electorates are not enough. Those who escape from this method are precisely the opinion voters as we have seen numbers in hand.
These elections basically represent the largest life insurance for Mario Draghi and with two deadlines, one very probable and one possible. The first deadline is that of the Quirinale 2022, where someone would have liked to have the Prime Minister’s train arrive at the terminus with the promotion to President of the Republic. But that terminus is clearly (barring the explicit wishes of the Prime Minister) now a stop for someone else, both for the situation in the country and the road still uphill for the exit from the pandemic crisis and the relaunch with the implementation of the PNRR, both for the signal given by these elections.
There second deadline is the one that arrives in less than 18 months, when the political elections cannot be excluded regardless that the solution to an electorate disenchanted by politics and parties becomes Mario Draghi’s candidacy as a non-political but administrative leader of an Italy that between 2023 and 2026 must carry out all the projects of the PNRR, spending all the European 209 billion. For this second scenario it will be important what will happen in the two coalitions in the coming months and it will be indicative what will be the result of electoral participation that will reach the administrative elections of 2022, on a very different and even less striking sample than this year.
Finally, one of the great merits of the center-left in these 2021 elections certainly deserves a note. The United States teaches us, with its tradition of high abstentionism (with some recent and not surprisingly historical exceptions), that one of the essential components in the construction of electoral campaigns is that of the non-voting motivation of traditionally enemy voters. That is the ability to set up a strategy that, assuming a high abstention rate, convinces as many opposing voters as possible to stay at home rather than go to vote holding their noses.
Here are undoubtedly numbers in hand and especially in the regional capitals and provincial capitals this technique has been governed much better by the center-left than by the center-right and in fact numbers in hand (even seat by seat) the correspondence between percentage growth is clear and sometimes scientific. and numerical abstention and sometimes almost identical reduction of the vote for the center-right. A fact that has been seen for example in the two Lombard capitals in the vote and which is not the result of chance but of a job. And of course also of the collaboration of those who have lost especially in the choice now out of the history of candidates presented about 120 days from the vote and with the summer holidays in between. A genius that alone is worth a few more points of abstention, not produced by the center-left campaign or even by the chosen candidates.
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