It is no longer time for euphemisms or reassuring dialectical balancing acts. The figures we read in the newspapers today are not ‘cyclical fluctuations’ or ‘unexpected braking’: they are the autopsy report of a country that has decided, with methodical obstinacy, to stop breathing.

While politics squabbles over chairs, nomenclatures and polemical tweets , the reality of the facts tells us that Italy has become the tail end of a Europe that, despite a thousand difficulties, has started walking again.

We are last in annual growth and, even more alarmingly, recent International Monetary Fund projections condemn us to remain last in aggregate growth over the next three years. This is not just a legacy of past years; it is a judgement on our immediate future. While our partners are planning transition and growth, we are preparing to be stuck at ‘zero point’, prisoners of an inertia that now appears irreversible.

The humiliation of numbers: the overtaking by Athens

For years we looked at Greece as the continental bogeyman, the living warning of what we should not become.
Well, today, reality throws an atrocious irony in our faces: Greece has surpassed us in fundamentals.
After having gone through the supposed hell of the Troika and the ‘tears and blood’ reforms, Athens today is growing at a pace we dream of, and in the debt/GDP ratio, we have managed to do worse than her.

While we continue to trade debt for wealth, our public spending has broken through the 1.1 trillion euro wall. The result? A public debt of over 3 trillion.

But the number that should take any citizen’s sleep away is another: the more than 80 billion euros per year in interest on the debt. It is an astronomical sum that does not build a single kindergarten, does not pave a kilometre of road, does not fund a scholarship. It is the pizzo we pay to the past for guaranteeing yesterday’s electoral consensus.

The wage desert and phantom productivity

The most dramatic figure, the one that touches the living flesh of those who work, is the productivity that has been stagnant for 30 years.
It is a unique case study in the western world. If productivity does not grow, real wages cannot move. And in fact, Italy is the only country in the OECD area where real wages have remained substantially the same as they were in the early 1990s, while in Spain, France and Germany they were growing by 30 per cent or more.

Today we are witnessing a paranormal phenomenon: employment is growing – which government bulletins trumpet in triumphant tones – but GDP remains stagnant.
What does this mean?
It means that we are creating low value-added work, poor work, pure service work that does not produce innovation.
We are a country that is exchanging its ancient industrial vocation for a subsistence of precariousness and micro-services.

The silent haemorrhage: the brain drain

Why should a young engineer, a doctor or a researcher stay in a country that offers entry salaries stagnating at 20 years ago while the cost of living gallops up?
The answer is cynical: they do not stay.
The brain drain is no longer a phenomenon of ‘cultural enrichment’, but a haemorrhaging of human capital that we have paid for and trained to give away to our competitors.

When a recent graduate sees that 400 km away, across the border, his salary doubles and his protections increase, the choice becomes rational.
Our system expels the brightest minds and retains those who have no alternatives or those who enjoy position rents. We are exporting future to import stagnation.

Reforms never born: the bureaucratic jungle

If productivity is at a standstill, an ecosystem that punishes those who want to do business is also to blame.
Civil justice as slow as a sloth, a jungle of authorisations that discourages any foreign investment, and a bureaucracy that does not serve the citizen, but exists to justify itself.

For thirty years we have been talking about ‘simplification’, but each law ‘simplifies’ by adding new subparagraphs and new obstacles. We have timid liberalisations that stop at the lobbies of the usual well-known, protecting petty vested interests to the detriment of national competitiveness.
It is a country that is afraid of competition because competition requires merit, and merit is a concept that our politicians have removed from the vocabulary.

The PNRR illusion

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan was supposed to be the ‘Marshall Plan’ of the new millennium.
Billions of European Euros to rebuild the foundations of the nation. Yet, looking at the implementation, the risk is that it will turn into yet another opportunity for small local interventions, rainfall of grants and current spending masquerading as investment.

We are using funds to ‘plug holes’ in asphyxiated municipal budgets instead of creating digital and physical infrastructure that will change the face of the country.
It is the victory of the local over the global, of the ‘small is beautiful’ (albeit inefficient) over the strategic vision. If we also waste these billions, we will have no more alibis: it will be the definitive certificate of managerial incapacity.

Demographic assisted suicide

Into this picture comes the demographic windfall. A country that does not have children is a country that has stopped believing it has a tomorrow. But the problem is not just poetic, it is mathematical. With a debt of 3 trillion on our shoulders, who will foot the bill if the taxpayer base shrinks every year?

Demographic hell also shifts the electoral centre of gravity towards conservation.
An increasingly older population will inevitably vote for those who protect the status quo, for those who promise not to touch pensions today at the cost of destroying the labour market tomorrow. This is generational dumping unprecedented in republican history.

The ‘tummy syndrome’: we are to blame

We arrive at the truth that no one wants to utter: the fault is ours, not theirs.
It is too convenient to point the finger at ‘the caste’ or the ‘palaces’. The Italian political class is not an alien entity; it is the faithful mirror of the aspirations of an electoral body that has ceased to be a citizenship in order to become a clientele.

We like to have our tummies ‘titillated’. We are not looking for leaders who show us the arduous road to reform, but barkers who promise us that the decline can be painless. We want building bonuses without asking who is going to pay for them, we want amnesties, we want government spending sprinkled in.
Politics has simply adapted: it has become an electoral catering service that serves poisoned dishes, knowing that the customer will never look at the final bill, as long as the taste is sweet in the short term.

The circle closes: one year from now the same story

You know what the real drama is? That, despite everything, we could still make it.
Italy still has enormous private savings and peaks of excellence that endure despite the state. But the window is closing. A year from now we will vote, and the tragic certainty is that we will reward those who have been proposing the same recipes for thirty years.

We will once again choose the comfortable narrative over the reality of numbers. We will prefer the alibi of external blame (Brussels, the markets, the economy) to the responsibility to change. Ours is an euthanasia assisted by popular consensus.

Ad Maiora?

If the deficit figures see us today trailing behind nations we thought were on their knees, it is not because of bad luck, but because we have stopped planning. In Italy we continue to live by gimmicks, ‘plugging holes’ with new debt and hoping that tomorrow will never come.

If we continue to vote for those who promise us the moon knowing that they don’t even have the ladder to get there, the decline will no longer be a misfortune, but a collective guilt.
Forgive the outburst, but numbers have no feelings. And our numbers are screaming at us that the party is over.

Ad maiora.