Abstention: the vote betrayed by inaction

We keep hearing, with a certain drawing-room condescension, that Italians are disenchanted with politics, as though millions of citizens had suddenly lost their sense of public affairs, their appetite for debate, even the elementary instinct to defend their own future. It is a convenient reading, but profoundly inaccurate. Italians are not disenchanted with politics; they are disenchanted with inaction, with the promise that never becomes a deed, the reform that never becomes everyday life, the vote that seems solemn on polling day and irrelevant the following morning.

The figures are no ornamental detail. Turnout at the 2022 general election stopped at 63.91%, the lowest level in the republic’s history; at the 2024 European election it fell to 49.69%. We are looking not at mere civic laziness, but at a fracture between popular mandate and the perceived effectiveness of democracy.

The mature voter does not expect a government to transform the country by decree, nor overlook the existence of the Constitution, checks, financial constraints, independent powers and safeguards. But the demand is something more serious: when a majority receives a mandate, that mandate must be exercisable, debated, corrected if necessary, but not neutralised in a swamp of postponements, opinions, missing regulations, administrative inertia and interpretations which, while presenting themselves as neutral, sometimes acquire political weight without ever having faced the voters’ judgment.

Here a new rule is needed, simple and almost surgical: every significant public decision must have a traceable implementation history. If a law is passed, publish not only its text but the list of measures needed to make it operational; if those measures do not arrive, publish which machinery is holding, slowing or blocking them, specifying the responsible body, procedural stage, missed deadline, formal justification and elapsed time. Not to pillory individuals, but to prevent bureaucratic anonymity becoming a form of unaccountable power.

This would be a reform in democratic hygiene. Citizens have a right to know whether a measure is stuck in a ministry, a directorate-general, an inter-authority conference, a technical office, a mandatory opinion, an appeal or an implementing decree never written. Democracy cannot merely say who voted for a law; it must also say who, in practice, prevented its concrete existence. Only then does voting become a civic instruction again, rather than theatre.

In politics, too, we must stop cheering and start studying. As long as voters remain fans, others package slogans, outrages, fears and loyalties of the day for them; when they study instead, they compare promises with results, distinguish an announcement from a measure and a measure from a real effect. That is where they cease to be consumers of other people’s politics and become citizens again: the sovereign judges of power.

Trust in institutions also confirms this need for scrutiny: according to Istat [Italy’s national statistics institute], in its report on 2024, only 22.4% of citizens give political parties a trust rating of at least sufficient, while Parliament and government remain at percentages that should reassure nobody.

Those who no longer vote should not be insulted, flattered or blamed. They must be won back with results, responsibility and consequences. Voting will regain its central place when every promise has a deadline, every delay an institutional name, every obstruction a public justification and every apparatus the decency to answer to the country that maintains it.