Vote, oh vote — it's not a Modugno song, it's what we all need to do so we don't end up governed by criminals, thieves, the corrupt, fraudsters, fools and know-nothings who are destroying this country and starving it to death.
I'm not talking only about this particular referendum. Besides, it's against the law for a head of government to tell her people to go to the beach and not vote. With the whole gang of sidekicks behind her. That pathetic non-invitation alone should be enough to send us running to the polls — grandmothers in wheelchairs included.
This referendum, whatever the right-wing has done to muddy and trivialize it, actually affects all of us directly. It's about workers' rights. I'll say that again: workers' rights.
The five "yes" votes are obligatory — obvious, really.
Why would we refuse the chance to find out whether, after multiple fixed-term contracts, we might finally have the right to a permanent position? Why would we refuse the right, if we're injured at work, to claim damages from all the contracting and subcontracting firms involved? Why would we refuse the right not to be fired without just cause? But above all — why would we, as workers, not want more rights? And why should a foreigner whose children were born in Italy, who works here, pays taxes and social contributions here, who has never committed any crime — why should that person wait twelve, thirteen years before being granted citizenship? I say twelve or thirteen because the bureaucracy — after the mandatory ten years — takes several more years to close the file. So the five years in the referendum become at least seven or eight in practice.
The right doesn't want us to vote because this referendum is about our rights — and taking away our rights is exactly what these people are working at, every single day.
Think only of the contemptible swindle of the so-called "security" decree, where in reality the government wants only to protect itself from our right to criticize and to dissent. They pass whatever laws they like, by decree — sometimes laws that are openly unconstitutional, because apparently there's an urgent need for their particular brand of nonsense — and we're supposed to sit down and be quiet, no signs, no megaphones, no blocking the street in case we inconvenience the blue cars.
Vote, oh vote — let's go to the polls singing, and show these people that we have no appetite for fascism.
Are you not sick of these abuses, these injustices? Does it seem remotely possible to you that Italians should be dying of hunger while these people pocket some of the highest salaries in the world? And the backroom deals? Can't you see, behind all of Meloni's decorative chatter, that intricate web of threads that connects this government?
To the polls, for God's sake. Vote. But above all, show them we're not just a handful of people. They are not the majority of Italians. They are a small percentage of a small percentage of those who vote. The same faces, decade after decade — people with various interests on the right and on the left who dutifully show up at every election. And the others? The real majority of this country? They don't vote. They're disgusted, they've lost faith, they no longer feel they have a stake. Ask them and they'll say: you're all the same, I mind my own business, if I'm young I leave — I don't recognize myself in this Italy of crooks anymore. That's the real majority of Italians, and only the votes of that real majority can change the fate of this country, can send packing these criminal associations with their privileges that the rest of the world can only dream of. Crooks who care only about their own interests, who couldn't care less about us — and who fleece us a little more every day.
Vote, oh vote.
Alessandro Ippolito