It may, at a first and superficial impression, appear as an extemporaneous reflection if compared to the needs of the contingent moment. Yet, it is not such, since it constitutes the dogmatic basis of reference for the present party context and for that, "potentially", in the future.

In particular, you will remember, in recent days the news that the Neapolitan Court would have ordered the suspension, as in fact it suspended, of the effectiveness of the votes by which in August last year the Statute of the 5 Star Movement was amended. and the election of Giuseppe Conte to the Presidency had taken place. Why remember today that apparently insignificant event? Why, you might ask, talk about it here and now beyond the paradox that underlies it and qualifies it in terms of institutional legal “nonsense”?

Well: the reason is one and only one and, on closer consideration, it deserves to be discussed and shared. Through that decision, in fact, which seems to have only proclaimed, and consequently decreed, the inexistence of a Movement / Party confused since the "establishment", and indefinite in its "ends" for being the uncritical and not at all selective container of variegated requests coming from a hypothetical as generic "democratic base", we wanted to legitimize a basic "misunderstanding" in the context of the already uncertain "internal democracy" of the Parties, of all the Parties without distinction, and therefore not only of that inherent to the Party of the Penta-Stellati.

Provided that this "internal democracy" has ever existed, and / or exists in the present context, from the end of the First Republic to today.

In these terms, the reflection is anything but obvious and, at the same time, by no means irrelevant in its practical effects because, on closer consideration, it is proposed as an interpretative and "speculative" paradigm of the future party landscape, as evanescent in its consistency as destined for institutional oblivion.

Especially in the present moment it seems to be witnessing (but it is only a pale conditioned impression), on the one hand, to a progressive exaltation of the "institutional" functions of the parties to be this exaltation "favored" by the forced "formation" of a government of (dis) national unity but also "allowed" by their programmatic and instrumental inconsistency and, on the other hand, to an equally progressive, as constant, erosion of their functions of "representation and legitimation", as if the relationship between the functions described struggles to survive to its inverse proportionality.

In other words, and perhaps more simply: to the surprising increase in the level of "institutionalization" (and consequent homogenization) of political groups, the loss of the regulatory system of "internal democracy" of those same party groups would seem to act as a dangerous counter-altar. , and therefore their (in) ability to reflect themselves in the social context on a level of otherness and autonomy with respect to "authority" which, on the other hand, should be limited to constituting the pure and simple "synthesis" of a lively political system.

Let's be clear: this erosive transformation of the natural function of parties, admitted and not granted that someone among us, if not the most "mature" by age, is able to remember what it is, does not seem to have been either accidental or totally unaware, since, in some in a way and to some extent, it seems to have its roots in the tendency to enhance plebiscitary "governance" models by now resigned to placing their "luck" on the lesser and / or greater capacity of leadership to act as a catalyst for popular consensus and such as lead to the systematic configuration of the party model as a cold and anachronistic "election machine".

But, you might ask, what would be the connecting elements between the internal democracy rules of the parties and the mechanisms of exaltation of the leadership whose "fortune" is as evanescent as it is subject to the temporal limits of naturalistic contingency? Well: although it may seem impossible, the aforementioned elements of connection exist, since the impoverishment of the internal regulatory forms of party formations is matched to the process of de-valorization of the “membership” mechanisms.

In the meantime, because joining a party and the regulatory conditions imposed would presuppose, as in fact it should presuppose, the democratic participation of the so-called "base" in the decisions relevant to its existence and growth. Therefore, because that "base", unlike what would seem to happen today, cannot simply be assumed as a complacent and "powerless" instrument of reverential legitimation of a leadership that is not always widely shared.

Finally, because the "parties", in their being "organizations", presuppose the shared and deliberate exercise by a large majority of multiple functions useful for forming the "synthesis" of government action properly understood. So much so that it is precisely the crisis of leadership (for example that of Matteo Salvini, of Enrico Letta, of Giuseppe Conte himself who seems to have never exercised it), has determined, conditioned and aggravated the process of "fluidification" of the various political identities which, even if in the recent past seemed to be tied to the strong affirmation of their own opposing ideologies, in the current contingent they would seem to have left ample and unbridgeable space for organizational and creative "gaps" of image which, in turn, seem to have influenced the intervened incapacity, even of "proclamation", and of elaboration of principles and values.

If we were to ask ourselves "what" exactly defines the identity of each individual party, I believe that we will not know exactly how to respond since "limits" and "counter-limits" are intertwined, getting confused, in the defining mechanisms of (in) performative capacity of parties.

A deep, irremediable fracture has been created between the concept of pure and simple "identity" and the more complex one of "identification" since the latter, far from being a simple "belonging" to a group, connotes instead for its “relational” moment, ie of subjective perception of the founding elements of the reference group, with every consequence on the level of the formation of “currents” as elements of de-formation and ideological distancing from the “base”.

In conclusion, parties no longer exist because the intransigent conception of representation has been lost as the glue between the leaderships, that is, those who have been called to interpret the role of political leadership, and their own membership base.

In this sense, and to close the circle, the events that have affected the 5 Star Movement are nothing more than the reflection of the degeneration of all party groups which, on closer consideration, have now lost the ability to build lasting representations and strictly identified.

The party has become an obsolete, anachronistic concept, de-contextualized with respect to social organization and its performing rules.

Today, the parties are "tamquam non esset". On what basis, therefore, will it be possible to proceed with the renewal of the country's ruling class?

Giuseppina Di Salvatore - Lawyer, Nuoro

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