One of the few Italian politicians with a sense of history, Giulio Tremonti, compared the present emergency from Coronavirus to 1914. With the shooting in Sarajevo at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg empire, the First World War began and the Belle Epoque, the period begun in the last decades of the 19th century, between scientific innovation, industrial progress and widespread optimism, ended. The bullet of the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not only ended the Archduke's life, but also the era of empires and the planetary hegemony of Europe. What 2020 will bring, the shock of the virus, with its burden of deaths, destruction of proud certainties and economic disaster, we still do not know. However, we are convinced that the months, the days we are experiencing are those of a hairpin bend in history, of an economic, cultural and existential paradigm shift.
There will be time to deepen ethical and anthropological reflections, but in the meantime it is necessary to save what can be saved and show courage, inventiveness and planning ability, so that these times are not the last of yesterday, but the first of tomorrow.
Let us remain on the economic and financial front: globalisation is in crisis, today it is contagious because it has been contagious for thirty years. What should we do, then? The premise is the need to shield our nation from the dramatic effects of a crisis that can wipe out the well-being that has been laboriously conquered over the last twenty, thirty years, lost in nibbles and bites. It is time for serious decisions, national responsibility and new choices. Recovering sovereignty, economic, monetary and political, is the precondition for a new start. Among the Italians who are working with greater energy, a group of men and women - economists, scholars, thinkers, political analysts - emerges who are working on the construction of a new paradigm, trying to build a centre of gravity - made of ideas and concrete measures - capable of determining a radical change.
Metapolitics, sterile theory? Not at all, the principle is "primum vivere". With the contribution of a host of economists outside the academic, political and ideological mainstream, a real plan of national salvation has been prepared. Ideas, projects, measures, strong but absolutely realistic proposals, able to shake the nation in its darkest moment, but above all to restore hope. From now on, from today. It is not an invitation, but a peaceful call to arms to seize, in the midst of an extraordinary and unforeseen global crisis, the opportunity to impress, finally, a broad economic, monetary, productive and geopolitical change, oriented to overcome the old paradigm and adopt a new one, more sustainable, human and positive. In a subsequent paper, we will try to indicate the guidelines and the ideal assumptions that animate the plan's drafters. Here and now, we will try to provide a first "toolbox" of the project developed by personalities such as Nino Galloni, Fabio Conditi, Alessandro Coluzzi and others. It is very urgent to make the compatriots understand that Italy does not need international loans, both in the dramatic form of the European Stability Mechanism, i.e. the end of Greece, the sale to vultures and the robbery of the nation's resources, and not even in the less violent, but still alien to the national interest, of the so-called Coronabonds.
by Maurizio Blondet