Four Questions for Politics

Soon an electoral campaign will be under way in Italy. I will vote for the party that seems to me most credible when addressing four problems I believe to be the most serious.

The first is the spread of war, causing extreme suffering, refugees and instability. The second is climate change and the other ecological and medical emergencies that are putting the future of our species at risk. The third is the current breakneck increase in economic inequality, and the kinds of concentrations of wealth that are immoral and that generate conflict. The fourth is the presence of vast atomic arsenals, which continue to represent a real and terrible risk, heightened by various recent threats to use them.

These seem to me to be serious risks to us all. Only politics can resolve them; but it can only do so if we as citizens reward a political force that wants to tackle them.

In foreign policy, Italy is one of the world’s major industrialized countries, and with the exit of the United Kingdom it is one of the three principal countries of the European Union. It does not need to always follow in the slipstream of other Western countries. It can make its presence felt, use its voice to communicate values and offer concrete proposals in relation to each of these problems. It can assume a clear-cut position against war, withdrawing the many troops that it has positioned around the world, placing them at the disposal of the United Nations instead.

Internally, Italy can stop contributing to the slaughter, as it is currently doing as one of the major exporters of armaments. Innocent families have been annihilated in Yemen, on a daily basis, with bombs made in Sardinia.

It can take advanced measures to reduce carbon emissions and the promotion of environmentally friendly political aims, as other far-seeing states have done.

It can seek to even out the social disparities within its system, in the most straightforward and traditional sense, by taxing those with the greatest wealth. The redistribution of wealth is a principal function of the state, and the current growing concentration of wealth is both extreme and dangerous.

With a justified sense of pride, it can simply liberate itself from all the nuclear weapons belonging to others that are currently on its territory. It has this right – and the moral duty towards itself and to others.

These are four major objectives, and they are not unrealistic: in the past, humanity knew how to find ways of repeatedly curbing the outbreak of war, to agree on measures to safeguard the environment, to correct exaggerated social inequalities and scale down the nuclear arsenal. There is no reason why we cannot do so now.

But to do so requires an engagement from each one of us, in the simplest form possible: voting for a party that wants to do so.

Each one of these objectives has an inevitable political cost, because each will upset some people. I will vote for the party that will undertake to implement these objectives.

I believe that the future can be better for all of us and the worst dangers avoided only if common interests prevail over those of individuals, and if collaboration prevails over conflict. If talk prevails over force, and dialogue with others over fear of others. Within our own country and throughout the world. I am waiting for a party speaking this language.