A-Infos (en) Italy, UCAD'I #184 - THE VOTE FOR SALE (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In the run-up to the European elections and in conjunction with those of 
some Regions and Municipalities, the news, stimulated by judicial 
investigations, deals with the sale of votes and the role of the 
so-called card masters or caciques who control the voting market . The 
eternal problem of the sale of consensus is intertwined with the 
phenomenon of transformism which leads interest groups representing one 
or more elected officials in local government bodies and at a national 
political level to move into the most convenient alignment to ensure 
business, which needs to be protected from the exchange vote. If there 
were any need, what is happening clearly demonstrates the vices of 
politics and the inconsistency of respect for the principle of 
representation, demonstrating the fact that the management of public 
affairs as well as politics is in fact the prerogative of an elite which 
from time to time sometimes he disguises himself in order to maintain 
and exercise power. Once elected or politicians, they become independent 
from the voters and make the most convenient choices for them, often not 
respecting the mandate received.
In this situation, it is not surprising that an increasingly smaller 
number of eligible voters participate in the vote, in the belief that 
nothing changes and in the face of the obvious uselessness of voting. 
Abstentionism, considered the death of democracy and participation. it 
is actually the product of disillusionment with the functioning of the 
system of representation and the compromise of politics with power and 
business, a radical and perhaps indifferent form of response from the 
electorate who have become aware of the lack of influence of the vote.

The structural causes of the problem

Even before taking into consideration the impact of organized crime or 
business groups on voting, it is good to examine the structural causes 
of the problem, constituted by the institution of delegation. The vote, 
expressed once and for all and for the duration of a mandate which 
generally ranges from 4 to 5 years, does not foresee and is not 
accompanied by any form of verification, control and reporting required 
of the delegated person who therefore has a period of consistently ample 
time and all the possibilities offered to him by the office to make the 
delegated power conferred on him fruitful for his own purposes. This 
lack of control over the action and behavior of the delegated person can 
be mitigated if nothing else by introducing moments to verify compliance 
with the mandate received and correctness in carrying it out.
What is wrong with delegation is that it happens without conditions; it 
was once thought that the party should carry out this control function, 
i.e. the organization that expresses those elected through the common 
sharing of ideals, a program and objectives. In the ranks of the party 
the militant acquired and formed his own political culture, experimented 
with collective action and class solidarity, built a complicity of 
common action which contributed to binding him to the other militants 
and inserting him with an active role in the implementation of the 
political line of the party. A non-secondary role of control and 
orientation was entrusted to the political community constituted by the 
party which influenced the behavior of the delegate, verifying his 
concrete actions. Well, this control function of the party has 
completely disappeared and this is because in fact the parties today are 
electoral committees, devoid of ideals and programs, without a common 
project that brings together the forces of the political community 
towards the objectives collectively identified and shared by those who 
refer to the party or who have placed their trust in the candidates 
representing that party.
At this point our analysis necessarily shifts to the crisis of the 
parties which largely derives from the disappearance of ideal contents 
in political action, from the absence of a project for society which 
refers to clear and distinctive values of the position of that political 
party. In particular, the crisis of the parties concerns the left of the 
political spectrum or self-styled left, which lacks a careful and 
scientific analysis of the economic and political phase, supports 
short-term and merely electoral proposals, lacks political planning and 
a future vision of society, has lost the points of reference that 
constituted the distinctive characteristics of a visibly left-wing force.
The case of the position of the reformist left parties towards the war 
is emblematic, which, due to their ideological matrices, should by 
definition be pacifist and in any case against the war, while they are 
instead warmongers and convinced of the need for rearmament.
This loss of identity makes the parties unrecognizable and distances 
voters from them who, without points of reference, distance themselves 
from politics and develop an awareness of the futility of voting by 
abstaining. By doing so they allow an increasingly marginal and limited 
number of citizens to participate in the electoral debate, effectively 
transforming it into a sort of opinion poll at the end of which the 
members of the political class remain the same, repositioning themselves 
according to convenience.

The end of ideologies

The political elite celebrated the end of ideologies, convinced that 
they were an obstacle to the management of power exercised without any 
contestation. They aim for stable governments, they bet on laissez 
faire, they need the operator not to be disturbed. Increasingly 
intolerant of any form of control, they attempt to build illiberal 
democracies, managed by autocrats and top government figures, removed 
from any control of elective assembly bodies. To justify this request 
they invoke the need to adopt decisions quickly to respond to the 
frenetic pace with which phenomena develop in society. Hence the success 
of figures such as the premiership which sometimes overwhelm every 
principle of representation with the result of distancing citizens even 
further from participation in political life.
The so-called Western democracy is today reduced to a system where an 
ever smaller share of potential voters participates in the vote and 
legitimizes the political system. While the structure of the social 
structure appears more like a set of parameters of tension, continually 
subjected to verification stress for which inequalities multiply and are 
constantly subjected to checks, the level of stability of the system is 
constantly verified, putting it to the test to test how much difference 
it is able to withstand between the number of rich people and that of the
absolute poor, how many how many inequalities it is able to tolerate, 
how many injustices it manages to make accepted while maintaining the 
management of power and the apical configuration of the social structure 
unchanged.
In this new context it is hypocritical to talk about the rule of law, 
welfare, rights and duties, guarantees and individual and collective 
freedom because all rights are progressively and irremediably 
increasingly attenuated and in fact we are moving globally towards 
adoption of a single system of government whose variations are apparent. 
Thus, taking sides in defense of democracy, Western values and other 
such talk appears in all its illusory and inconsistency.
That said, the only way to get out of the irreversible crisis of 
authoritarianism towards which political and social management 
institutions are headed is to return to utopia, starting from the belief 
that another world is possible, a more just world, a basically 
egalitarian, with a social structure in which equal access to the good 
things in life is ensured for everyone also thanks to a more equal 
distribution of resources and work. This means having a strategy and a 
program, having rational and achievable objectives, taking into account 
that what was difficult to achieve in the past, today that technology 
could change the relationship of women and men with work, becomes 
potentially achievable.
To do this we cannot rely on the role of reformist parties because in 
reality they are not reformists but tend at best towards what they call 
a rational management of the existing situation, without taking on a 
project for a future society.
We need to go back to thinking about a possible social revolution that 
has a radical and profound impact on production structures and the 
distribution of power, that redistributes wealth, creating a tendency 
for equality between men and women and between them without distinction 
of ethnicity, religion, gender , skin color, and any other different 
parameter of distinction of the human race.
Changing things means first of all convincing yourself that another 
world is possible and working to make change possible because tackling 
problems in a radical way is not always utopian, but rather it is the 
only way to find a solution.

The events of Bari, Turin, Palermo, Catania.....

Numerous investigations by the judiciary still underway are 
investigating possible vote buying and selling and when this is 
happening it constituted a wonderful opportunity for the Democratic 
Party and 5 Star to break the alliance in view of the municipal 
elections in Bari. Without going into the merits of the accusations made 
by the judiciary , still to be verified, which
reveal a buying and selling of votes, the granting of favors and 
privileges, we note that the alliance between the left-wing parties 
already presented elements of fragility due to the ambition of both 
party secretaries to be the leaders of the alliance and we point out 
that on a practical level, at least as regards the elections to the 
Municipality of Bari, the real problem is their possible postponement in 
the face of the dissolution of the expiring municipal council, by the 
investigation commission set up by the ministry of the interior because 
in relation to the results of the vote, we remember that the electoral 
law provides for voting in two rounds and therefore it cannot be ruled 
out that 5 Star and the Democratic Party will be split in the first 
round, and then the votes of the respective electorates will converge on 
the candidate called to participate on the ballot. Of course, given the 
situation in Bari, it is also possible that the centre-right, if 
excluded from the ballot, decides to support in the second round which 
of the two contenders they like most, perhaps after yet another more or 
less obvious negotiation for a transformative convergence on the name of 
one of the two candidates.
This last hypothesis among the possible ones would be the bleakest.

GL

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/04/25/il-voto-in-vendita/
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