Populism costs more than pensions

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They were supposed to save forty million euros by cutting pensions for the elderly, but they'll end up spending at least nineteen million to give them back. Even more, considering the lost tax revenue, interest, and revaluations. Cutting pensions was the most uneconomical reform in history, in the sense that it produced the smallest possible savings at the highest imaginable cost. In 2018, during that attempt to impose a chronically illiterate regime in Italy called the Five Star Movement, it was decided to cut the pensions of 1,338 former parliamentarians. Most were between eighty and ninety years old. This elite had to be punished. However, it soon happened that Parliament was forced to restore the pensions of 60 percent of them, approximately 800 grandparents. The measure was, in fact, unlawful.

Yesterday, however, in a decision destined to further prolong the story, the Chamber's Jurisdiction Council rejected the appeals of the remaining pensioners (in 2020, there were around 700; today, there are around 500 because 200 have died in the meantime). But let's not delude ourselves: the survivors will appeal, even with an injunction. The €101 million fund set aside by Chamber officials—politicians make populist decisions, but the administration fixes them—will remain there. And it probably won't be enough. A fund for unconstitutionality, so to speak. But here's the point: if you set aside the money, it means you know you're wrong. The Constitutional Court has said it in every language of law: pension cuts yes, but temporary, for a maximum of three years, with serious justifications, criteria of rationality and proportionality . Parliamentarians are citizens like everyone else. Here, however, it has been a Commedia dell'Arte from the beginning, where laws are gags, reforms are tweets, and emergencies are proclaimed from the same balcony where poverty is abolished. Life annuities, after all, were the original gesture of Italian anti-parliamentarianism in the digital age. Parliamentarians' pensions weren't the goal: they were the symbol. The very idea that those who held public office could receive social security benefits became blasphemy. It wasn't about reform, but about humiliation. About erasing the distinction between responsibility and privilege, between office and guilt.

Roberto Fico was the enthusiastic leader of that brilliant legal and accounting operation. A name that hasn't been lost on anyone. Indeed, today Elly Schlein's Democratic Party is considering running him for the presidency of Campania. Among the most lucid to denounce the absurdity of the law today is Peppino Gargani, a former Christian Democrat. He's ninety years old. Meanwhile, Angiolo Bandinelli, a former Radical MP and contributor to Il Foglio, ninety-two at the time of the cuts, said: "I hope at least that with some of that pension money, these Five Star Movement kids can buy books, even just primers on constitutional law." He died three years ago. Without a pension. And with him, a generation of intelligent and ironic people who knew how to lose with elegance, but not without pointing out the absurdity of the game, has almost died out. If there's one thing this story demonstrates, it's that populism is costly. Much more than pensions. And it has a flaw: it never dies.

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