After the last three years featuring three non-elected governments – nominated by the President of Republic Napolitano in order to come up with an institutional exit strategy from the dire 2011 economic crisis – these elections marked the end of any significant parliamentary opposition (and possibly of a plural parliamentary debate) against the PD discourse, as well. A framework brought on by the fall of Berlusconi’s party, among defections, scandals and arrests; the unavailability of alternatives from the liberal right and the fragmentation of the radical one; the slow recovery of the xenophobic and anti-EU Northern League after it was plagued by scandals and corruption in the past few years; the subordinate and inane character of the institutional left, verbally antagonist but actually ancillary to the PD in many administrative territorial bodies.

After having been marginalized by media and parliamentary bodies during the past year – in spite of its remarkable number of elected representatives – the anti-system (yet institutional) Five Star Movement (FSM) failed to overpower the ruling PD in these elections by evoking a cleansing of state administration, media and political bodies in a too ambitious “democratic restoration” drive. Renzi was able to partially co-opt these claims, by endorsing at the same time the demands of continuity for the interests of entrepreneurial and financial capital, thus actually imposing his PD as a “Party-System”. One providentially able to stand against the onslaught of the euro-skeptics and the far-right, as a bulwark on an European level too, at the opening of the Italian 6-months term at the head of the EU.

Still the silent majority backing the Renzi government could easily turn into a besieged minority. An all-time high abstention rate – very prominent in southern Italy – leaved only 58,68% voters to cast their ballot in these European elections; and only a rough third of these voters openly endorsed the pro-EU stance of the PD and its allies. This precarious legitimacy of the Party-System is amplified by the inability of mainstream media reporters and pollsters to read the ongoing changes in territorial loyalties, the discontent spreading on a molecular level in the Italian society, and the composition of the exploited’s self-organization. The growing self-referential character of their representation of the political spectacle – a trend emphasized by Berlusconist and post-Berlusconist politics – completely banned antagonism from the political and media discourse, or evoked it as a matter of public order to arouse moral panic in the population.

The real country is another matter. No intermediate bodies do stand anymore between the longings of the capital to violently reshape Italian society and the material needs of the oppressed and impoverished classes. On one side, there are the brutal evictions of buildings and student houses occupied out of need; unrestrained environmental devastation, in order to make way to great events and works such as the Expo 2015 and the TAV; police abuses against exploited loaders and arbitrary arrests of housing struggle movements’ spokespersons; sell-off of public assets and common wealth to the national and global capital…on the other side, the progressive and grassroots’ construction of an antagonist otherness and counter-society; through the pickets, the occupations, the assemblies, the clashes against the agents, the social events held at temporary or permanent self-managed spaces (dinners, sport, festivals, after-school activities).

A counterpower that, starting out from basic care and control of the territories, comes to the point of the questions “who decides over the uses of collective resources?” “Who decides about what kind of work is necessary or harmful for the community?”; and wants to disrupt the glorious illusion of dominion of the Party-System – starting from its showcase in Turin, on July 11, for the European Summit on Youth Employment – by joining other broad social forces looking for a comeback against European technocrats, liberals and rightists.

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