Italy is currently, as of this writing (October 25, 2008) embroiled in massive political turmoil. This has, to my knowledge, received no coverage in the American media. The New York Times ran a lengthy piece last week on the Italian political situation that didn't mention it, yet on our recent trip to Italy, we saw it, again and again, with our own eyes.
The Berlusconi government has introduced a law that would cut over 100,000 teaching jobs in the country and reduce the public elementary school day to a half-day. This would revert Italian schools to a mode of operation not seen since the days of Mussolini. Evidently, unlike his friend George Bush, Berlusconi still retains his popularity and feels he can get away with this. But it's sparked massive protests.
Our first inkling of this occurred in Venice where I saw this banner over the canal. Its text is, I think, a plea not to rob the future, and to avoid school cutbacks. I thought it interesting and snapped a picture. I assumed it was some local issue and then forgot about it until I got back and looked at our pictures. Later I learned that "Non Rubateci il Futuro" is actually the name of a national organization that is fighting this proposed law.
We really began to see that something was up when we got to Florence. On our first night there, while walking back from dinner through the Via Calzaiuoli (the main high-scale shopping street in the city) we ran across a political demonstration. Not what we expected to see after 10:00 on a Monday night! Thinking it a small demonstration we stopped to watch. But it was much larger than that. It took close to an hour for all the marchers to clear the point where we were standing. Marching were teachers' unions, national labor federations, elementary, high school, and university students. Some evidently belonged to political organizations, but many others just wanted to keep their schools open. I estimate at least 50,000 marchers based on the time it took.
Gelmini, referred to in one of the banners below, refers to Mariastella Gelmini, Berlusconi's Education Minister after whom the "reforms" are named.
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The following days we saw several banners hanging from the windows of high schools, trade schools, and universities proclaiming the schools occupied in protest against this law. These schools were closed, perhaps for the school year as one banner suggests, and perhaps forever.
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In some places professors were lecturing in the piazzas and in the parks, instead of their occupied classrooms.
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The whole thing had an air of '68 about it, but most of these people (the students if not their teachers) can have no memory of that. It was frustrating to me as a non-Italian speaker to be unable to get deep into the details of what was going on here. The English speakers I found were sometimes eloquent about their opposition to this "reform" (always in quotes), but no one I spoke to could give me any answers to where they thought this was all leading. I would buy La Repubblica or other Italian papers and see pictures from all over Italy of similar protests. But I could only pick out the occasional word here and there and only faintly glean what was happening.
From these sources I've learned that 350,000 marched in Rome on Friday, October 17, and many thousands more in other places. A Vaporetto pilot strike occurred that day in Venice in sympathy with this cause, as well. Now that I am back in the States, I can go the La Repubblica website and run the articles through the awful but better-than-nothing Google translator. Here I learn that the protests have continued, that Berlusconi may be planning to attack them with police, but still no clear picture what is going on. I don't know if Berlusconi's popularity has continued or started to fall away, or what the final outcome will be. Perhaps it is some sort of Italian kabuki theater in which the forces confront each other symbolically, leading later to the inevitable compromise. But I don't think so. I think this is something new, or at least new for the recent period.
I guess we should thank our lucky stars that George Bush never had this much power over our educational system or who knows what mischief he might have gotten away with.
I continue to take an interest in these events - unreported though they may be in our media. I learn from the same sources that the protest marches have continued and gotten larger, one report mentioned a 2-million person protest in Rome. I learn also that the government had decided to ignore them. and move forward with its plans, much as the Bush administration ignored the street protests against his Iraq adventure. And that some sort of police repression has begun unlike the hands-off treatment we observed. But there are also calls, I don't know enough of Italian politics to know how powerful those making them are, for some moderation in the government's position.
This movement continues. I learn that it has a name, "L'Onda", (the wave). Massive marches have continued, most recently one of 200,000 in Rome on Friday November 14th. The government is now making vague noises about dialogue, but without really conceding anything. Berlusconi's popularity has taken a modest hit, but he still runs the show. Reports surface of the right, looking for a provocation as an excuse to crack down on l'Onda, but none has thus far been forthcoming.
And I've at last discovered a site that covers these events somewhat, in English. This site is called the European Tribune with articles on L'Onda here and here. It was on the EuroTrib that I first learned the name l'Onda.