democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

democracy today and specifically of its assumption that citizenship is a conceptstrictly tied to the terrestrial dimension.It is also true, finally, that international business men, diplomats and professors of thebest Universities, find in effect, other channels to “influence” the process offormation of the political will and even more that of lead pressure groups whosepower is often even greater that that of a simple parliamentarian. And, yet, thisconsideration defines with even greater clarity the terms of the question.To exclude a relevant and large part of the public opinion from the concretepossibility to participate in normal political processes means to leave such processesto the representation of the segment of population with medium or low possibilitiesand income. It also means postponing to a later moment, not institutional and thus notregulated moment the confrontation with the more advanced part of society.This entails a separation between on one hand the visible exercise of power which isincreasingly less relevant, and on the other, what instead happens outside thoseofficial forms of democracy 25 .Under these circumstances, to be “public opinion” becomes increasingly useless andalong with the poverty of the democratic process, we see a driftage of “classes” andsegments – a process in which society as a whole disintegrates.The greater becomes the harm caused by the problem we are analyzing, the wider isthe geographical scope of the institutions we are electing. In fact, the case of theEuropean elections is a rather extreme case of failure of mechanisms that –notwithstanding their increasing inadequacy on a national level – have beenreplicated on a continental scale.Even more incomprehensible is that the elections of a supranational parliament(composed by parliamentarians, that in theory, represent the entire Europeanpopulation) are done by computing the results of territorial-based competitions 26 .Between the victims of this mechanism there is the Transnational European PoliticalParty that, for some time, many have considered necessary in order to “articulate apolitical European area” (objective that the same constitutional treaty has greatlymissed after identifying it as its major priority).Let’s try to understand what would happen to such a political party in an electoralcontext such as the current one.25 This is, partially the analysis that Negri and Hardt, in the “Impero”, 2002, have developed in outlining thecharacteristics of new imperial hegemony26 To this paradoxical results of the last European elections, Vision has dedicated the “European Election QuickCollection” accessible on www.vision-forum.org.26