Politics & Power Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Poverty, Buttiglione suggests, isn’t just an income problem; it’s a bill that gets routed to the most private institution in society and then quietly ignored. The provocation in his phrasing - “search for poverty” - flips the usual story. Instead of picturing deprivation as something that happens out there, in “failed neighborhoods” or among the “unemployable,” he drags it into the living room. The family becomes the shock absorber for everything the state and the market don’t want to price in: elder care, disability, childrearing, unemployment, mental health crises. When those systems fail, the family is expected to catch the fall.

Calling the family a “great investment” is deliberate political framing. Investment language borrows legitimacy from economics, implying measurable social returns: stable kids, cared-for elders, less crime, more cohesion. But it also carries a sting: investors normally receive support, incentives, or at least recognition. Here, “no-one helps” casts families as unpaid contractors underwriting the welfare of everyone else.

The “spotlight” line is a cue about visibility and shame. Family hardship often stays hidden because it’s intimate, moralized, and gendered; caregiving labor is still treated as natural rather than economic. Buttiglione’s remedy - “political choices that sustain the family” - signals a specific ideological lane: pro-natalist and socially conservative Europe, where anxieties about demographic decline, welfare strain, and cultural change get channeled into family policy. The subtext is a bargain: strengthen families and society stabilizes; neglect them and poverty becomes hereditary, domestic, and harder to see until it’s too late.