"A Road to Nowhere"? Anii 80 între tranziția și începuturi

Since the crisis of 2008, there has been a considerable amount of attention towards a phenomenon long considered to be exclusively circumscribed to specific areas of the world and basically not implanted in contemporary European and North American political systems: we are talking about that particular democratic pathology called populism. In Italy, in particular, the attention curve towards it reaches its zenith after the 2013 elections. Even considering the acceleration imprinted by the media revolution expressed in the advent of Web 2.0, it should actually be evident how a phenomenon of such dimensions and extension - the 2016 vote will make it topical even in Washington - certainly could not have been generated in the space of a handful of years. Returning to the Italian example, and stopping only at the evidence already known, a party with a clear populist vocation was born and established itself even before the end of the so-called 'First Republic' in 1994, which is the case of the Lega, while the first twenty years of the new political season will be dominated by Forza Italia, a formation that no longer has anything left of the traditional mass parties and that in turn adopts a clearly populist narrative and organization. The thesis put forward here is that the real roots of the phenomenon lie in the decade in which the model of political organization, that Gramsci would define as Fordist , disintegrated, in those 1980s marked by the strong awareness of living a transition and the equally severe inability to conceive its destination in terms other than merely that of a 'non-place', ideally defined by what is missing and not by what is there. In the crisis of the entire political system, the need for relocation common to all its main components - thus not only to the post-fascist area traditionally identified as the cradle of contemporary populism, but in particular also to the Catholic and post-communist ones - will determine the conditions of the current populist and techno-populist rise, in a slow path along that, paraphrasing a song of the time, we could call a road to nowhere.