In the year in which the real estate bubble burst, the CEO of a construction company described in this way what the role of some public officials had been during that gold rush. “It’s as if all the councilors, when they are elected, receive a ticket that gives them the option to participate in a requalification or an urban plan. It depends on how they use it.” The consequence, he added, had been the creation of a parallel circuit of black money. “Because, of course, the companies pay all these people for their services, but this extra cost must be passed on to house prices.”
In his version of how things had gone, the man placed on the public sector most of the blame for the formation of the bubble and what became known as the culture of pelotazo. It was a cynical interpretation and a bit far-fetched. But it expressed a belief widely held in the business world at the time, according to which public servants were fickle people who could be tempted. Said in the language of a bar: “You find me a councilor or a technician who goes straight to Calés and we will surely end up understanding each other”.
It was 2008. By then the banks had already turned off the real estate credit tap and large groups in the sector were filling the black business chronicle with bankruptcies and payment suspensions. The hangover affected the financial institutions that participated in the party. And the courts were filled with lawsuits that had to be resolved in the following years. In an image that was used a lot in those days, the retreat of the tide had left all shame in the air.
The waters have receded again, this time from everything that surrounded the management of the Administration during the covid pandemic in 2020. David Runciman, a prestigious British political commentator, has written these days about the disappointment that causes the fact of looking back and verifying that of all the exceptional situations we experienced in that period, we are only able to remember the worst.
The truth is that we have almost forgotten what happened in those weeks in the spring of 2020. A little memory: the second half of March, days after the virus appeared in Italian Lombardy, the fear of a disease unknown left us in a state of shock and silently penetrated all the houses.
Fear gave way to pain. We found that the virus preyed on the most vulnerable. With the elderly, the older ones, in some cases forced to die alone without being able to say goodbye. He was also cruel to the poorest: if you lived crowded together, you had more numbers to command. In the end, the tiredness of confinement came, the collateral damage of isolation, locked at home waiting for the health administration to put an end to it.
It wasn’t all horrible. There were brave professionals, generous people. We lived strangely calm and silent hours. For a few days humans thought they were together, that they had something in common. There was a lot of money from the State (the kind that never falls from the sky) to prevent the system from collapsing. And the vaccines arrived unusually quickly, only a year later. For a few months the sky was clear, and some thought that the fight against global warming was won.
But that feeling of fulfillment lasted as long as the fear lasted, just as long as we felt threatened. When that urgency disappeared, so did the good intentions.
Meanwhile, governments and administrations had entered a mad race to get masks first and vaccines later. Shipments contracted by one country ended up in the hands of another if it offered more money. China and Russia produced mediocre vaccines that they used as foreign propaganda. Western states funded better vaccines, but hoarded them, in a gesture that poorer countries have not forgotten.
Among us, while there were people who gambled their lives, there were also those who, as happened with the real estate bubble, thought that they had been hit with a ticket that they had to take advantage of.
The fourth anniversary of the covid pandemic will be sadly remembered for all this. For the stories of ready and determined couples, commissioners who put the administrations in contact with companies that imported masks from China. They could be friends or acquaintances of politicians. They could even be relatives of politicians: the partner, the brother, the father. In some cases there was nothing strictly criminal about their behavior. Speculation is the mother of opportunities. But it was immoral behavior, unacceptable for public servants who knew, or at least had at some point the suspicion, what was happening around them.
To put it in the way of David Runciman, the covid pandemic has had a long-lasting version in the form of hypocrisy and political corruption. The smart couple came out of the real estate crisis relatively unscathed. The covid-ready parents, on the contrary, arouse a particular aversion and their discovery has only deepened the citizens’ loss of trust in the system. Surely the most essential good, and the most fragile, in these times of political uncertainty.
