Yesterday evening 20 September 2021 the capital of Barbagia, after a perhaps too long period of isolation, has returned to be the protagonist of the high-level island political debate. At the invitation of the "Garibaldi Station" association which, through a full-bodied calendar of events, aims to bring political representatives back to a discussion and direct confrontation with the voters, and with all citizens, islanders and constitutional law scholars of the caliber of Antonello Cabras, Omar Chessa, Gianmario Demuro, Desirè Alma Manca and Angelo Rojch, wanted to discuss, in the presence of a curious and interested assembly, "Sardinia, Autonomy and the Future" with a view to favoring the shifting of the axis of the confrontation, in a subject so thorny and delicate due to the multiple sensitivities involved, from personal positions that express the respective political color of militancy to that of the contents of the work carried out daily by the institutions, perceived in recent times as very distant "domes" of power divorced from respect to the needs of the Sardinian people and with respect to the regional context as a whole and its disharmonies and internal joints.

An opportunity, undoubtedly, to break the patterns of the "Cagliari-Centrismo" still prevailing and to give light, through a conscious and concrete debate, to an internal city reality perhaps deliberately and culpably forgotten in the project for the Reform of Local Authorities recently dismissed by the Council Regional, or rather, from its majority group. At the end of the long debate, conducted on several levels of investigation, the juridical / constitutional one, the strictly political one, and the more markedly social one, the accrued sensation, or at least perceived, was reconnected to the constant recurrence, in the mind, of a single question of dogmatic flavor and pragmatic content: "mutatis mutandis", does it still make sense to discuss "Sardinian statutory autonomy", that is, the autonomy of Sardinia and Sardinia in its different content profiles? That same "autonomy", so shrill on the lips of many, but only truly felt in the hearts of a few (the reference is not addressed to the wise speakers who have spoken, all quite passionate), still constitutes the key to understanding the island's political action today. or has the replacement of the ruling class that took place in the past years of local government (as well as in the present one) favored a progressive process of ideological impoverishment?

An observation, on the deductive level, and from my point of view, seems to have prevailed in absolute terms. The one for which the so-called "Sardinian question", widely understood, and regardless of the content that one chooses to give to such an expression, has never managed to influence the political action of national importance, too concentrated, and always, even in the current context, to conceive the country in the only abstractly admissible distinction: that between "north" and "south" generically understood without further qualifying distinctions. This has inevitably contributed to impoverishing, and in a certain sense distorting, the debate on the island's territorial inhomogeneities with respect to the peninsular context.

It is difficult to say today whether an authentic Sardinian "identity" that has the strength to forcefully impose the legitimate claims of its "Terra Amada" has ever existed in the past, and / or still exists. But, for how the interventions of the speakers, extremely punctual in their unraveling, took place during the debate, and on the basis of the aspects they respectively considered, and concerning above all the financial and managerial nature of the island, to emerge, from my point of view, was not only the urgent need to "rewrite" the plot of the next institutional structure of the Region with respect to the survival (if really such) of the reasons for a "specialty" that has never managed to find on the territory its natural declination, but also the acknowledgment that in the absence of “financial autonomy” there can never be an authentic “juridical autonomy”.

The second, without the first, would be, as it currently is, an empty container entirely suitable for delegitimizing what would be, instead, the legitimate claims of the Sardinian people. In this sense, again according to the feeling I retract from it, the debate is still open, and the action taken for the recognition of the "principle of insularity" in the Constitution, considered in itself only, and in the absence of a substantial content that tells in what possible ways that recognition should produce direct effects on the Government of the Territory, cannot in any way act as the "turning point" for the recovery of a lost "autonomy", and probably never actually recognized and / or exercised. To use an expression very dear to the Regional Councilor of the Democratic Party Roberto Deriu: "we act with hope" and we hope that this is just one of the numerous moments of confrontation suitable for recovering the debate on the future of the island as a whole, therefore also in its criticisms internal articulations with a view to recomposing the island's geographic fabric and overcoming a mutilating internal and external isolationism.

Giuseppina Di Salvatore

(Lawyer - Nuoro)

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