Disposable void, how to reverse course after the demographic collapse

The South is empty. The cradles are empty, the schools half-empty, the internal areas are poor in young people due to the departures of students, workers, dreamers. The kids from Naples, Palermo, Bari don’t ask each other “What will you do?” but “Where will you go?” because the South is perceived as useless. A “disposable void”. The South has not become deserted of young people by chance.

Emptying the South was the Italian response, as instinctive as it was erroneous, to the national demographic decline. The birth rate decline is discussed as an event that has emerged recently and this is a sign of poor understanding of a phenomenon that dates back to 1972, when in a handful of provinces between Trieste and Siena the cradles did not compensate for the deaths, and the gravity of which is proclaimed by the 1980, when for the first time there were “never so few born since the unification of Italy”. Politics pretended nothing happened partly because the emergencies appeared different, partly because they bet, reasoning automatically, on Southern fertility and therefore on the departure from the South of the third massive emigration after that of the late nineteenth century and that of the 1960s. The first had changed the Americas, the second filled the factories of the North, the third would have captured engineers, economists, biologists, architects and plugged the holes in the state machine: employees, teachers, doctors, nurses, carabinieri, policemen, magistrates.

In Milan, Turin, Bologna and even Rome, for decades there was the illusion that the aging of the population affected mountainous or peripheral areas, that companies, offices and universities would remain crowded thanks to the arrival of workers and students from a The eternally backward and therefore prolific South, a sort of Africa at home without overwhelming integration problems. The outcome was catastrophic: in the 1990s there was indeed a recovery in internal migration but, accompanied by the flexibility of employment contracts and continuous transfers, it increased the sense of precariousness of the young generations and crushed southern fertility until it collapsed and became in 2006 the worst in Italy: a fact without historical precedent.

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That strategic mistake, deluding oneself that it would be enough to move young people from South to North to manage the birth rate decline, led to others. Of understanding, first of all, with Istat which, in the midst of the collapse in births in the family survey, asked couples how many people they had invited to the wedding and not why they had stopped at one child, if not zero. And when, decades late, the questions from the Statistical Institute arrived, not all the answers were published. Meanwhile, Italy has become different, it has been overturned to the point that in just a few decades the once most fruitful region found itself last. But, once again, without the case opening a national debate.

Italy, steeped in prejudices, did not understand the changes because the first prejudice about the South is that it is the land where nothing changes. This is why politics was distracted for half a century by the decline in births only to suddenly discover that the country has a gigantic demographic problem. And it still doesn’t fully understand it, because Istat hasn’t found an effective communication strategy and is raising alarms about depopulation by aiming its telescope ahead over the years: to 2050, to 2080… And instead soon – not in decades – There will be no sufficient replacements for retiring doctors, nurses, law enforcement officers and municipal secretaries.

The universities – all of them, the peripheral ones and those that stand out in the self-promotional rankings – will lose freshmen. The social security and healthcare systems will have to face unprecedented growth in costs. The result is a paralysis of action and ideas which, let’s be clear, causes everyone to lose. The South, because it is rapidly being emptied of its wealth of best intelligence. And the North, because the end due to consumption of internal migratory flows will expose its intimate weakness, already evident from the fact that no Italian region, not even Lombardy, can compare with foreign countries when trying to attract graduates.

In Vacuum to lose I tried to answer the question “How could this happen?” I tried to understand “what” really happened: in the territories, among young people, in the relationship between men and women. And how we can change course. Is there still time to get out of this? Yes. Not much, but it’s there. The demographic collapse is faced not with discounts that last as long as a budget law but by looking at reality without blinders and developing a strategic plan shared by all political parties, because it will have to last beyond the fate of the single government, with a vision that holds the objectives together and fuels the hopes of each territory, eliminating the current distortions.