Italy is in a funk, a malaise, a bad humor. A country that fascinates and infuriates Italians and tourists alike, a country that claims to have mastered the art of living has the least happy people in Western Europe.
In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment.
“It’s a country that has lost a little of its will for the future,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and a possible future center-left prime minister. “There is more fear than hope.”
The first populist movement in decades is growing, led by a stand-up comic Beppe Grillo who's become a blogger with the tenth most-inked blog in the world. Using the Internet, he encourages like-minded others to organize meet-ups across the country to choose candidates to stand against the Parliament that is hated for its financial corruption, inaction, ineffectiveness, excess, not to mention the 24 convicted criminals who are members.
This deep well of distrust for politics and politicians manifests most strongly in the younger generation who know how much better things work elsewhere.
Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence. Many of the brightest, like the poorest a century ago, leave Italy.
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The divorce rate has risen. Large families are a thing of the past. Italy has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates, the fewest children under 15 and the greatest number of people over 85, apart from Sweden. Unemployment is low, at 6 percent. But 21 percent of the population between 15 and 24 did not work in 2006. And the old are not letting go.
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“The generational problem is the Italian problem,” said Mario Adinolfi, 36, a blogger and an aspiring lawmaker. “In every country young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope anymore. Your mom keeps you home nice and softly, and you stay there and you don’t fight. And if you don’t fight, it is impossible to take power from anybody.”
We don’t have a Google,” he added. “We can’t imagine in Italy that a 30-year-old opens a business in a garage.”
Says Beppe Sevenigni, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, says change has to come first from the Italians themselves.
The malaise is: ‘I can see all that, but there is nothing I can do to change it,’
To change your ways means changing your individual ways: refusing certain compromises, to start paying your taxes, don’t ask for favors when you are looking for a job, not to cheat when your child is trying to reach admission to university.”
That’s the tricky part,
We have reached a point where hoping for some kind of white knight coming in saying, ‘We’ll sort you out,’ is over.
We Italians have our destiny in our hands more than ever before.
Can a popular movement change the government and the culture as well? No wonder there's more fear than hope for the future.