Daily Italian Politics Briefing, Friday, May 24

Posted on May 24, 2013 by wpadmin

On Sunday the 26th and on Monday the 27th almost 700 Italian cities will elect new mayors and city councils.

1) In Tuscany elections will be held in 21 cities, among which Pisa and Siena. Yesterday Mayor Renzi and Beppe Grillo were in Siena to support Bruno Valentini and Michele Pinassi, respectively running for the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement.

The Mayor of Florence explained his position on the reform of the Italian electoral law and on the proposal by two PD members (Anna Finocchiaro and Luigi Zanda) to introduce some restrictions to prevent movements and associations without legal status to take part in electoral competitions.

Renzi said that legislators at the national level should adopt the same law used to elect mayors for general elections, and on Finocchiaro and Speranza’s proposal he declared that “ we can’t make an electoral law that throws out other competitors. They must be defeated with intelligence and ideas”.

2) Recent polls show that just one month after its formation the Letta administration has a very low level of confidence, the lowest a government has ever had after one month of administration. Polls show that while confidence in Letta’s cabinet settles around 45%, after the same period Former Prime Minister Monti was at 62%, Silvio Berlusconi in 2008 was at 59%, and Romano Prodi in 2006 was at 53%.

A reflection on the US and Italian electoral systems

Posted on May 23, 2013 by wpadmin

By Joseph Solomita, NYU class of 2014

Like most politics majors I can’t help but get excited when election time rolls around. Obsessively checking the preliminary polls, watching every hilarious campaign ad, and contributing in every possible way to the candidate of choice. Unlike most politics majors however, I have had the rare fortune of living through two general elections in the span of four months. Doesn’t seem possible? Think again.

Soon after the 2012 United States general election in which President Barack Obama decisively defeated former Governor Mitt Romney, I departed for Florence to begin my semester abroad. I arrived in Florence on January 29th 2013, just one month before the 2013 Italian general election.

I have to admit I knew nothing about Italian politics. I mean I knew who the former Prime Minister was but that was more due to my closet addiction to TMZ then my knowledge on international relations. Like any other student with a thirst for knowledge and a love for politics would do, I started doing as much research as possible on the Italian political system. What I found out is that any American that complains about the bureaucracy, gridlock and bi-polarism in American Politics should take a glance at Italy’s system and I guarantee they’d sleep a little easier. Italy has one of the most complex parliamentary systems in the world and the results of the 2013 general elections did not bring any more clarity to the matter.

Unable to form a governing majority, Italy remained under the rule of technocratic leader Mario Monti, until April 23, 2013, when President Giorgio Napolitano appointed Enrico Letta, member from the lead vote getting coalition, Prime Minister of Italy. For the first time in Italy’s Republic, a grand coalition has been formed. Whether this unprecedented experiment will be a success is something that is yet to be determined just as history has yet to write the legacy of Obama’s second term.

The system of electing these leaders is something that is already being dissected. In America, a rigid two party system has been the norm since the country’s existence. Although social media has undoubtedly changed the game a bit, the core of American elections are fundamentally the same. Both major parties go through a primary system in which they nominate the representative they hope to be elected leader of the nation. In Italy it is much different, with just one party holding a round of primary elections, citizens are forced to vote for parties and coalitions rather than a representative.

To me, the biggest difference between the systems of Italy and America is that President Barack Obama has a mandate from the people to run the country. We know that 51.1% of voting Americans directly selected Barack Obama to lead them and therefore any decision he makes is supported by the voting majority. Granted, a president can be elected with less than 50% of the vote, it has happened 12 times in America’s history and the list is highlighted by some very popular presidents including Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton. Either way, in America we know that the man leading our nation is the guy the most Americans have directly voted for, with just four other exceptions in our country’s history in which the losing candidate received a plurality of the popular vote but lost in the electoral college.

In Italy, the Prime Minister is never directly elected. The Prime Minister is dependent on parliament’s approval to give him a vote of confidence, and just as we saw in this current election, once Pier Luigi Bersani, the man whose party the people voted for, couldn’t get a vote of confidence , the president was able to simply selected any member of the top vote getting coalition to lead the country. We saw a similar case in 2011 when former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned, President Napolitano selected a technocrat with no political experience to lead the country and the citizens did not get a say, only parliament.

No electoral system is perfect, we see flaws with every system, the goal of any government, however, should be to best protect and represent the view of the people. And I truly believe America does that better than any country in the world.

Daily Italian Politics Briefing, Thursday, May 23

Posted on May 23, 2013 by wpadmin

What happened this week?

1) Prime Minister Letta attended his first European Council meeting this week. His administration, Letta says, is trying to promote reforms to fight youth unemployment (that will also be the main topic of the next European Council, scheduled next month) and to reactivate the labor market, though it will be hard to have tangible improvements before the end of the year.

2) Amnesty International’s 2013 Report declares that in Italy in 2012 there has been “ a gradual erosion of human rights, delays and unfilled gaps in the law, constant and increasing violations”: violence against women, the failure to include the crime of torture in the Criminal Code, and new measures to control immigration are the main factors that contributed to this alarming portrait.

3) Mario Borghezio, a member of the European Parliament from the Northern League Party, made many racist comments against the Minister of Integration Cecile Kyenge. Towards the end of April Borghezio, host of an Italian radio program, was talking about his position on Minister Kyenge’s proposal to change Italian citizenship law from jus sanguinis to jus solis. He said that Kyenge would be a good “housekeeper” instead of occupying a position (she’s a physician) that would rightly belong to an Italian, and for this reason, appointing her as the minister for integration has been “a bad choice”. When someone objected that she is Italian as well, Borghezio concluded by saying that in Italy “citizenship (to non natives) is given on a random basis”.

All Italian political forces harshly criticized Borghezio and many members of Movement of a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD), the europarty that he is part of, recommended his expulsion. Borghezio publicly apologized to the Minister and suspended his membership in the europarty.

Biographical Notes on Edgar Morin

Posted on May 15, 2013 by wpadmin

Edgar Morin (Nahoum) is a French philosopher and sociologist of Judeo-Spanish origins. He was born in Paris in 1921.

He became interested in socialism during the Spanish Civil War and became an advocate for the Popular Front. When France was invaded by Germany in 1940 he started to assist refugees and committed himself to Marxist socialism. He was a member of the French Resistance and it was then that he chose to be called Morin rather than Nahoum and he would use this pseudonym for the rest of his life. In 1941 he joined the Communist Party and in 1945 he started serving as a lieutenant in the French occupation army in Germany. When he came back to France, he decided to pursue his activities with the Communist Party but he was expelled in 1951 due to a critical article he published in the Nouvel Observateur. That same year, he became a member of the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research).

Morin carried out research at several other institutes, such as the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the University of Nanterre, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. He is also one of the founders of the International Ethical Scientific and Political Collegium, a high-level group created in 2002 “to respond intelligently and forcefully to the decisive challenges facing humankind”.

Edgar Morin: Education for the Future

Posted on May 15, 2013 by wpadmin

Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist, whose works are broadly trans disciplinary.

He presents some of his thinking on education in the interview “Seven Complex Lesson in Education for the Future”.

His aim is to spread a new kind of thinking that can help humanity overcome the challenges that face the contemporary era.

Starting in the 19th century, according to Morin, knowledge has become so compartmentalized that experts are unable to think through challenges that go beyond their area of expertise. First, we need to understand the nature of being human, Morin says, then, we must discover that “the treasure of human unity is human diversity and that the treasure of human diversity is human unity”.

We must also recognize the ethnical nature of being human: human beings have rights, he says, but also duties.

And we must acknowledge that all knowledge is uncertain. How can we deal with uncertainty? We must get used to “expect the unexpected” and understand that all the decisions we make are “wagers” with uncertain outcomes.

Morin, finally, discusses how human beings can “better understand each other”. To limit misunderstanding, we must learn how to be “self-observant”, “self-critical”, and “mindful of complexity”.

Education plays a key role, according to Morin. Watch the full interview here.

Read Edgar Morin’s ” Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future here.

Daily Italian Politics Briefing, Wednesday, May 8

Posted on May 8, 2013 by wpadmin

1) Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Angelino Alfano announced that in its next meeting the Council of Ministers will focus on measures against violence against women. Minister Alfano declared that the government “will find the money to take the necessary measures, because the protection of women is an invaluable priority”. Corriere della Sera reports on violence against women in 2013, demonstrating that this phenomenon is a real concern in Italy: since January 1st, almost every day a woman was killed by her husband, her son, her boyfriend, or her father. We hope that this negative trend will stop.

2) Prime Minister Letta announced that this weekend all the ministers of his cabinet will spend two days a retreat at Sarteano’s abbey (recently transformed into a hotel) in Tuscany, to “set the political agenda, to know each other and to become a real group”. Prime Minister Letta also underlined that each minister will bear his or her own costs.

3) Yesterday all the party members proposed by the Democratic Party and the People of Freedom Party for the presidency of the parliamentary committees were elected by the parliament, except for Nitto Palma (PDL), proposed by Silvio Berlusconi for the presidency of the Justice Committee in the Senate. Immediately after the voting, many PDL members denounced the fact that the PD has not honored the agreements they made during the negotiations. Another session of voting will take place today. We’ll see how the situation evolves.

Social Media Musings: One Million Book Clubs and Cooking Classes

Posted on May 7, 2013 by wpadmin

by Scott Cairns, NYU ’15

People have been meeting in book clubs, fantasy football leagues, and at their children’s soccer games long before the advent of the internet, so to say that social networks did not exist before the digital age would be a lie. It wasn’t, however, until online social networks became a ‘must-have’ that a massive protest movement like the Arab Spring or the worldwide Occupy movement really could become possible. The difference in the size can only be explained by people who previously were not involved in any ‘real world’ (non-digital) social network coming together and mobilizing across the world. It made such a difference in Egypt that a newborn baby in Egypt was christened ‘Facebook’ by his parents.

The difference, in my opinion, is the sheer amount of little social networks that one can belong to on the internet, rather than in person. From personal experience, I can tell you that it is impossible to be in two places at once. No matter how much one enjoys cooking and mystery novels, he or she cannot be at a book club AND a cooking class if they both meet once a week on Friday night. What he or she CAN do, however, is follow favorite authors on Twitter and ‘like’ them on Facebook, effortlessly and simultaneously connecting to others with the same interests. Chain about twenty or more of these little online book clubs and cooking classes together and the numbers begin to add up fast. Social clubs are not exclusive on the internet: you can belong to as many social networks with as many like-minded individuals as you like online, where people are meeting not once a week but 24/7.

Eva Anduiza of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a speaker at this coming Friday’s conference on Social Media and Political Participation touches on this a bit in the abstract of her upcoming paper, ‘Connective Action and European Mass Protest,’ where she talks of the internet’s potential to create ‘individual linkages through the personalization of collective frames.’ Essentially, Twitters and Facebooks are the ultimate personalizers of the social experience. Like a large scale version of online dating, everyone is now simultaneously friends with or followers of people just like them with the same interests, opinions, and dreams for their country or world.
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To learn more about our upcoming conference on Social Media and Political Participation, click here.

To join the conference conversation on social media, click here.

To learn more about the latest research at NYU in the field of social media and political participation, click here visit the online lab of NYU Professor and conference organizer Joshua Tucker.

Daily Italian Politics Briefing, Tuesday, May 7

Posted on May 7, 2013 by wpadmin

Yesterday seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti died at 94. Worldwide newspapers have dedicated articles to this man (check out the New York Times and The Washington Post), who has been one of the leading figures of Italian politics for more than sixty years, beginning at the foundation of the Italian republic in1946, immediately after the Second World War.

While expressing condolences, many politicians have also pointed to the fact that Andreotti was also a very controversial political figure, often at the center of the power games that characterized Italian politics until the beginning of the 1990s.

But today, following the appointments of the presidents of the various parliamentary committees, the feeling is that the old power games haven’t died: the general impression is that both the Democratic Party and the People of Freedom Party are trying to fill the parliamentary seats with the party members who have been excluded from the cabinet and from other prestigious positions. We’ll see if these appointments will be made on the basis of personal competence or if they will just be made to maintain political balance.