Politics & Power Quote by Emma Bonino

Italy is a country that fetishizes elites while practicing mass politics, and Bonino is cutting through that self-myth with a clean, slightly acidic generalization. By naming "the two great cultural and political currents" and then insisting they have "always only" cared about "the masses", she flips the usual Italian narrative: not a story of salons, avant-gardes, or Vatican intrigue, but a long contest over who gets to speak for ordinary people, who gets to organize them, and who gets to claim their moral authority.

The phrasing is doing political work. "Currents" suggests forces deeper than parties: Catholic social tradition and the leftist/popular tradition that ran through socialism, communism, and postwar mass unions; you can also hear an echo of fascism as a third, disruptive mass mobilization that complicates any tidy binary. Bonino, a liberal reformer with a history of challenging institutional orthodoxy, is signaling both admiration and warning. Admiration because mass politics built Italy's postwar democracy: welfare, labor rights, broad participation. Warning because "concerned with the masses" can mean genuinely representing people, or simply managing them - turning citizens into an audience, a bloc, a clientele.

Subtext: Italy's chronic governance problems aren't just technocratic. They're rooted in a culture where legitimacy is measured by how convincingly you invoke "the people", even when policy is opaque, patronage-heavy, or frozen by vetoes. Bonino's intent is to demand a different kind of mass concern: not paternalism or populist theater, but rights, transparency, and institutions that treat the public as adults rather than raw material.