“The scandal that has meandered along the tortuous route between Doha and Strasbourg over the past few days shatters two clichés at once. One is that of the left, which is understood as the moral record holder. The other is that of a strict and rigorous Europe. Both threaten to have long-term consequences.
The first aspect has been widely discussed. We are now dealing with personal, purely personal responsibility, and it is therefore politically (as well as criminally) inappropriate to entrust this matter to the Group of European Socialists and Democrats. And yet there is a certain dichotomy between the behavior of some that has just been exposed and all the sermons that have descended from the pulpits of the left to their political opponents in recent years. (Many of them deserve it all, by the way.)
But that’s exactly how Nemesis works. And for all the times that the Left has fired the darts of its indignation to meet the not always unyielding behavior of its opponents, just as often the same darts have come back like a boomerang. So today the right does not even have to bother to express as much outrage on its part. In fact, it almost seems to ride on the bad stories of the day with a kind of benevolent and perhaps almost amused elegance.
Now it is evident that the left is paying for some judicialist excesses of its past. Indeed, this claim to appearing as a cleanliness advocate in the presence of less morally worthy opponents seems perfectly suited to his own downfall. And once some (few, mind you) of their representatives end up in the dock, it becomes almost inevitable that they will be accused of the excessive preaching and flogging of their ancestors only a few seasons ago.
So perhaps the leaders of the left today should not only dutifully beat their breasts for the bad apples in their baskets, but also review the rhetoric of recent years. And perhaps, without acquitting any of this season’s culprits, one wonders if all the reading given by Tangentopoli in the past deserves an overhaul that makes it less one-sided than it previously was. A task that betrays a modicum of embarrassment, but which, at this point, should be undertaken with an intellectual honesty at least equal to the material honesty of which it prides itself.
But there is another, darker and more profound aspect that these events are bringing to the surface. And it’s the glaring contrast between a financial Europe that preaches austerity, trawls through member states’ accounts, imposes far too strict accounting rules on their balance sheets, posing as custodians of our collective economic decency on behalf of generations to come, and its parliament, which thereby becomes permeable to the corrupting influences we have just seen at work.
Here, too, it will not be about turning moral values upside down, quite the opposite. The construction of Europe is based on a certain accounting rigor, which is the flip side of the distrust between its countries and the mismatch of some of its interests. Therefore, whether we like it or not, this strictness resembles a constitutional requirement. But it is also evident that celebrating this imperative will be more difficult in the presence of those bribes that tragically expose the vulnerability of institutions to the most unworthy influences of states furthest from our standards of public ethics to have.
Both are uphill roads. The one who is called to turn left and rethink himself. And the one who must travel through a Europe that is too strict with others to be indulgent with itself. Tiresome rides, both”.
(by Marco Follini)