Politica e sistema bancario tra Prima e Seconda Repubblica.

The demolition of the economic public system and the establishment of a comprehensive privatization program in the early Nineties have been a decisive factor in the crisis and the transformation of the political system between the "First" and "Second" Republic. These processes, far from be configured only as a pragmatic response to the imperatives of financial nature accruing in the context of "external constraints" with the European community – and linked to the reduction of public debt and reduction of the primary deficit of the State – marked a turning point in relations between political and economic power. Hence, the resulting crisis of a model of political democracy founded - since the Sixties - on assumptions related to state interventionism and "financial appeasement" of the monetary authorities on a double side: that of public policies in support of economy and industrial development and the policy of consensus and expenditure tips by the parties, main referents of intermediation between State and society. The relevance of the banking system in the analysis of political change in Italy derives, in particular, from the critical role played by banks in the relations between the public authorities and economic and productive system. Role that came consolidated in a national context in which the State has historically had to perform a "tutorial" function towards a market and an industrial system affected by chronic shortage of risk capital. The crisis and transformation of the "State-banker" in the context of structural changes in the economy and politics attended in the last thirty years, provides a privileged key to understanding the long Italian transition, able to highlight specific elements of rupture and continuity. In particular those related to a disintermediation between political and economic power in itself not sufficient to eliminate the pathological interplay between politics, finance and industrial interests, but likely to turn it into a system even more extensive and disjointed in its institutional frame. An outcome of this, due to the fragmentation of the political system, to the organizational and cultural crisis of political parties and to the absence of a consistent pattern of market liberalization and reform of the financial governance of the country, in the context of the changes produced by the ever-closer integration between the national banking system with the European one, and the size of the global economy increasingly dematerialized. The financial crisis of 2007 would have been from this point of view, a challenge and a new opportunity for Italy, but also a danger of regression to forms of paternalism of national public authorities, likely to turn into the soil more conducive to collusive nature between "politicians without politics "and "capitalists without capital".