“How do you have a bad relationship? I tried but I couldn’t: it never breaks down, every word dissolves… We agree, however, that we don’t want to break up too.” Beppe Grillo, in an interview with “himself” published on his blog, he tries to end the controversy with Giuseppe Conte. The post-election joke according to which Berlusconi, in death, would have received more votes than the former prime minister in his lifetime aroused discontent among the elected representatives, leading the M5s group in the European Chamber to express unanimous solidarity with Conte. Other leading figures of the Movement have instead shown closeness to the founder and called for a return to the Movementist origins. Fractures that will be attempted to be healed at the constituent assembly announced by Conte, where Grillo intends to talk about direct democracy and “how to recover contact, dialogue and joint actions with activists, who have always been the fuel of the Movement”.
“But at the same time we cannot only discuss internal operating rules”, he continued, “but we must return to proposing radical and visionary ideas, distancing ourselves from a position that is old and outdated for decades. Talking about left and right is like talking of Ghibellines and Guelphs, indeed perhaps it is better to talk about the latter, because everyone must follow the Elevated”, he explains.
“The dual mandate rule should be included in the Constitution”
The dual mandate rule? “It is understandable that those who are in their second term today would like to eliminate it. After all, the survival instinct comes from our animal nature, and is irrepressible. But the purpose of every rule, ultimately, is to curb our animal instincts in common interest. The limit on the duration of mandates is not only a founding principle of the movement, but has also been a safeguard of democracy since the times of ancient Athens”. “As I have said several times, it should become a constitutional law, at least for the most important positions, as the United States Congress did after the death of Roosevelt, who was the only American president to have served more than two terms”, explains.
“But isn’t there a risk that the skills acquired over the years will be wasted?” he asks, replying: “In fact, I had proposed an idea of a ‘relay’ in which the ‘leavers’ would receive compensation financed by the incoming people’ to ensure the handover and transfer the acquired skills to them. Not to mention that Parliament should first of all interpret the will of the citizens, which is much more difficult to intercept when parliamentarians lock themselves away in the building for years in law, if anything, we would need legislative offices with good and competent professionals and not courtiers without art or role. The job of a parliamentarian should be different, that is, to capture and understand the needs of citizens to translate them into political direction, which in turn. it should be translated into law by capable and competent legislative offices. It is true that we proposed changing the title of parliamentarians from honorable citizens to citizen spokespersons”.
“Universal income before it’s too late”
“Even the most ardent enemies recognize that we anticipated issues that everyone is talking about today, starting with the environment and the circular economy. Then there was a witch hunt on reforms that actually worked: it was wanted, for example, abolish the citizen’s income to push young people to look for work; except that bars, shops and restaurants continue to find no staff, while crime on the streets has increased, perhaps also because leaving people in poverty is not beneficial to anyone” , continues the guarantor.
“The objective of full employment, among other things, in addition to being unrealistic, belongs to mental schemes of the last century, while in Silicon Valley the challenge of the century is to disconnect income from work, which are both important for well-being, but they are inevitably destined to no longer be related to each other”, he explains. Which means: “Those who wanted to abolish or reduce the citizen’s income often also venerate those – from Altman to Musk, from Gates to Zuckerberg – who have repeatedly invoked the unconditional universal income, which among other things would have a very wider than the citizen’s income. And I say that it is better to get there before a large part of human work is carried out by machines or artificial intelligence”.