“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

It is no coincidence that in Italy priorities for the good of the nation are undermined through a variety of local or collective identities. Combine an electoral system, that is rife with inter party bickering and self-focused politicians, with a range of collective ideologies and regional loyalties and change becomes virtually impossible. There are too many groups in Italy that depend on things remaining as they are and individuals feel vulnerable if these groups are threatened. Take as an example the reaction to the proposal to shorten the three-hour lunch break or the recent wave of strikes from taxi drivers and lawyers as they attempt to hold off deregulation of their jobs.

Italian life is also made more complicated through an almost slavish devotion to bureaucracy and any student of psychology will tell you that bureaucracy imposes rules as a means of control and as such is a major threat to change. But then in Italy its citizens usually overcome the constraints of bureaucracy where they can by simply ignoring the rules they do not like, or worse through petty corruption.

Italians will have to adjust their mentalities and begin to commit to the state because the nation needs to become a single entity in the way that other European countries are. In the first instance electoral reform must be the precursor to any changes. Reforms that create a climate in which the Italian people can make informed choices about what is right for their country as a whole and reforms that make inter party bickering and self focused politicians a thing of the past.

However in the final analysis the key question is how to change things without threatening he local way of life. As Tancredi Falconeri said in Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”