Young people and politics in Italy in times of populism (original) (raw)

2020, Elisa Lello, Youth and politics in Italy in times of populism, in Bello, B.G., Cuzzocrea, V. e Kazepov, Y. (a cura di) Italian Youth in International Context. Belonging, Constraints and Opportunities, London: Routledge.

The chapter aims at exploring young Italians’ attitudes, images and expectations towards politics mainly through quantitative data (recent surveys carried out by Demos and LaPolis - Univ. of Urbino) but also through some interesting findings developed from qualitative research. The qualitative part of the research is based on 109 semi-structured interviews which have involved youth aged between 18 and 30 and have been carried out between 2008 and o 2016 (the aim has been to include as much heterogeneity as possible in terms of gender, geographical provenience, social and economic background, d degree of education. Evidence based on these data leads us to identify, on the one side, a significant difference between young peoples’ opinions and orientations from the ones shown by adults and even by young-adults. On the other hand, a certain degree of coherence can be traced between young Italians’ perceptions, expectations and behaviors linked to the sphere of politics. It is possible, in other words, to recognize a kind of fil rouge linked to the broader social, political and cultural processes which have marked the period when young Italians of our days have lived (and still are living) the formative phases of their personalities. The period beginning from the half of the nineties appears distinctive, since it is from that time-point that relevant and broad processes of social, economic and political change brought about an unprecedented deconstruction of security and a consequent spreading of uncertainty (Bauman 1999, Beck 1999, Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) together with new kinds of employment contracts and lifestyles, ending up in the spreading of pessimistic attitudes towards the future (Benasayag and Schmit 2003). The fil rouge linking young Italians’ perceptions and attitudes towards politics becomes thus more deeply understandable in the light of those broader changes, which affected young people’s personalities and their capacity to imagine the society’s - together with their own - future. The capacity to imagine and to aspire - according to the elaboration by Appadurai (2004) and, in Italy, by de Leonardis and Deriu (2012) - emerges as a crucial element in order to understand young Italians’ relationship to politics. In fact, their image of politics looks like deprived of the ambition to produce any significant changes, and to aspire to any social scenario which may be different – in a relevant degree – from the status quo. In this sense, I argue that a technocratic kind of politics seems to emerge Evidence shows that young people have little trust in their capacity to influence political decisions, but they also look persuaded that politics itself cannot achieve any relevant changes: it has to content itself with little, fragmented, discrete adjustments. In this perspective, the differences between political identities and cultures tend to loose significance, and this looks consistent with their demand for a strong simplification of the political and the party systems aimed at nurturing governability (instead of representation or inclusion) and decisional and executive quickness together with concreteness. They stand in favor of a strict non-ideological approach where the fundamental criteria for evaluating political action are technical competence and honesty, while other aspects (such as the breadth of political action and its capacity to achieve change) tend to move to the background, or to eclipse. In this sense it is a ‘minimalist’ kind of politics: that is, a kind of politics which reduces itself to the management of the status quo, where the only noteworthy criteria seem to be honesty and effectiveness, and therefore saving time and money.