The Echo of Bergamo / by Franco Cattaneo.
“Confidence,” an asset not to be wasted, is the key word of Paolo Gentiloni’s speech in the favorable setting of Kilometro Rosso: “Our businesses, cities, Bergamo, and territorial systems have what it takes to compete and have confidence in the future.
I really believe that this industrious stability, this quiet security, this teamwork that you see in these places of excellence is absolutely crucial. An example for Italy, a message that will lead everyone to grow together. We have confidence and work in this direction.”
A success story
Bergamo global’s paradigm (exports grew 45 percent from 2009 to today, more than double the EU average), a story of difficult contrast to the crisis and success, in the eyes of the Prime Minister is consistent with the perspective of an inclusive society that he sketched in his own style: enhancement of human capital, capital-labor relations, business-territory link. An enterprise culture to be spread. He did so, Gentiloni, yesterday morning with a 20-minute speech, all played on the positive register without hiding the shadowy areas, paying tribute to Brembo patron Alberto Bombassei, and in the presence of the establishment, Minister Maurizio Martina, several parliamentarians, Mayor Giorgio Gori and Province President Matteo Rossi. If we are out of the crisis, the head of government repeatedly clarifies, the credit in the first instance goes to the “resilience and innovation capacity of the world of labor and business,” and this “claim of pride, protagonist of the recovery, feeds the capital of confidence that we need.” Italy, then, is back on the road: the public deficit relative to GDP in recent years has fallen from 5.3 percent to 2 percent, while projections for the eurozone promise continued stable growth: “We must have the awareness that the creative energy we see here, all around us, can finally unfold in a considerably more favorable environment: it’s up to us.” That is why the “return to growth should not be wasted,” and here is the policy juncture explicitly called out: “We have presented a streamlined budget law focused on certain objectives. It can be improved, but it cannot turn into a cloud of smoke signals aimed at this or that category.” In the face of this negative push and while parliamentary groups have submitted nearly 4,000 amendments, Gentiloni warns that the “cloud” would not help the path that is needed today and something virtuous must be opposed: he explains this with the Brembo motto (“Brake to run”) and then translates it as a Roman (“Let’s calm down”). In short, the recovery “should not be squandered, but looked after and reassured,” because the challenge is the fourth industrial revolution. And Impresa 4.0, the new name for Industry 4.0, is made to support the promotion of human capital: active policies, school-to-work alternation, extensions for super depreciation, tax credits for training, investments on technical institutes, a fund for intangible capital. “The future made of digital evolution and robotics,” the premier points out, “is not a negative destiny that divides society in two, if we get there while maintaining the cohesion that was the basis of the miracle of Italian industry. Here, then, is the social side entrusted to the resource of human capital “to avoid accentuating the divide between a sort of digital elite, cosmopolitan and landless, and workers who are underpaid and underqualified but have strong territorial roots.” “It is necessary,” he insists, “to mend rifts and tears, certainly not to open new ones. A concern that gives him the cue for a dialogical flyover after the referendum for the autonomy of Lombardy and Veneto: “This also applies to the sacrosanct push for greater autonomy that is being felt in several territories. Claiming efficiency and not selfishness: it must be a protagonism in solidarity, not separation.”
The relevance of the territory, the soft power that is born and developed along the concreteness of the map of municipalities: “The link with the territory is an essential part of the message of cohesion. The Italy of small villages has accepted the challenge of innovation and the future, projecting the image of Italy to the world.”
The geopolitical framework
A world marked by the unpredictability of the geopolitical framework, which the former foreign minister knows better than others for having faced it: “I certainly do not want to deny the presence of unknowns coming at us from Africa or deny the risks posed by the resurgence of sovereignism, of small homelands, of nostalgia for small or large empires of past centuries.” But, he concludes amid applause, returning conceptually to his starting point, “to all this we can respond by making our contribution, which is an antidote to these crises: making community and increasing cohesion.”