It would be easy to make ironing on the Europeanist event on Saturday 15 March, convened in Piazza del Popolo in Rome by Michele Serra, who collected a few tens of thousands of Italian citizens around him, mostly between half and the third age, quite visibly belonging to the urban class and a good bourgeois which, typically, constitutes the main axis of the vote of the center -left parties. It would be easy to make ironing, we said, above all having read and listened to the seriousness with which some of those who claim that they belong to that people, and perhaps to inspire it, have spoken from the stage and the media. But it would be a lost opportunity, which, however, has already been fully cultured by newspapers and commentators of various colors, because after the laughter – admitted to be able to arouse – it always remains little. While that small manifestation, for when it happens, as it happens, for the temporal and political context in which it takes place, deserves to be analyzed, being revealed and compared to different political elements.

Saturday, in absolute terms, there were few people

Let’s start, as a duty, to the proportions. Let’s take the numbers of the organization for good that counted 50 thousand people, a number that seems consistent with the dimensions of Piazza del Popolo. Think about how many people go to see games irrelevant for the ranking of teams on the pitch. Or think of the hundreds of thousands of people who participate in a technically non-political, but certainly identity, such as gay-proide event. Or how many more people, every year, despite the evident crisis of values ​​and anti-fascist practice, participate in the manifestation of April 25. The 50 thousand on Saturday are and remain few, despite being very celebrated and connected and photographed from above to show how full a square was always considered suitable for niche events. Today to bring people to the square, we know, it is complicated, because the meaning has been lost and we would even say the habit of making that gesture, and in fact in relative terms we can certainly speak of a good success for a niche manifestation. And yet, in absolute terms, we are talking about little stuff, which probably also has a lot to do with both the message and with the medium from which it started. Tell it and celebrate it as an extraordinary event.

Europe

The message, in fact. Once it would be said: “The platform”. What was the platform of the event? Just a short research, to understand that it was essentially all contained in the ideas expressed by Michele Serra first on Il Post and then on Repubblica. Is it possible to summarize the reasons for the convocation of that square in a question: “What a substantial turning point would be, if the first point of the program and the political action of all European progressive forces was the political unity of Europe?”. What a turning point would be, Serra wonders. And yet, the question is not rhetoric. The political unit of Europe, that is, basically the landing in the United States of Europe as a true terminal of the long and accidental integration process that started many decades ago, is a kind of arabic Phoenix, or better of Eternal Godot of recent European history. A rhetorical formula never set because never really arose, in which with less and less conviction and less and less success, political forces take refuge increasingly marginal in the Italian national scenario and beyond. It can be said: it is not a good reason not to believe it. Already. But believe it really means and implies to work because that popular consensus – the one in the European project – return to grow. If not to be majority, at least to coagulate around an active, conscious and “political” minority of European societies. Otherwise, putting the European political unit at the center of its program would end up for the already battered progressive forces a suicidal gesture.

The rearmament and all doubts

And it would certainly be today, and we see at another point of very significant reflection, that Europe as a political union has assumes a very concrete physiognomy and proposal, in the rearm plan proposed by Ursula von der Layen. Yes, because whether it likes or not – and really: it may like or not – the most united Europe that we are talking about today cannot ignore a precise, concrete, not contingent but strategic proposal, of a will to rearrange, and a centrality of the war investment on the future of the continent, and on the budgets of each member country. The promoters of the square wanted to emphasize that theirs was not a “bellicist” and Pro-Carm square, and they were certainly sincere. And yet, how can the idea of ​​supporting a greater political unity of the Union can really be split from this precise political line, expressed by the highest government body of the Union, that is, by the commission that represents the executive power of the same? A question that has remained substantially unavoided, to allow Piazza del Popolo to accommodate very different souls: full pacifists, skeptics compared to the rearmament as the secretary of the Pd Schlein, enthusiastic about the rearmament, and indifferent to everything, but lovers of the blue flag with the stars.

As you can see, the question is all political, and larger than the square a few days ago. How do “progressive forces” to put the political union of Europe at the center of their programs, if they are radically divided on the profound physiognomy that Europe wants to give themselves now and in the near future, also asking its members to divert public resources towards projects and defense devices, evidently subtracting them from other chapters of public spending? You can ask for “Più Europe”, while the one that is there proposes something to which it is not clearly believed, and asks for an onerous commitment from all points of view, including the ethical one, for the years to come? And can it be done while transversely Italian citizenship shows, perhaps more than any other European citizenship, skepticism and doubts about long -term rearmament plans, and on support for Ukraine, in the present?

All perplexities

It is difficult to take refuge in the idea that the process count more than the project, in the face of issues of this reach. Schlein does it when he presides over that square for fear that someone says that on the rearmament he has the same doubts of Salvini and Meloni, or for fear that Repubblica criticizes it, discovering his side to Conte that the square is “because there are or favorable to the rearmament”. The substance of the question remains, and is clearly illuminated by what happens in the center -right: even from there, on the rearmament and Europe the positions are as many as the parties that make up the coalition. But the glue of power and recognized leadership, that of Meloni, allows the end to recompose a framework of synthesis and units, also against a substantial similarity among the peoples who make up the center -right electorates, which cannot be said of the jagged “wide field” of the center -left.

Everything around, outside the politics of the parties, finally there is a country, a society, with its doubts, its ideas, its values ​​and its beliefs. It is there that the foundation of decisions in democratic countries matures, that is, collective consensus. The squares, once, were the place where ideas met, defended themselves, circulated and infected. In the time we live can perhaps return to being it, or becoming a place of identity fortresses increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. It is completely legitimate, it can also be corroborating and healthy for those who participate: the important thing, as always, is to know the rules of the game, and the objectives that can be realized.