The "auto blu" scandal

The Italian government is expensive to maintain. Way too expensive. In a recent article on the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's main newspapers, a research showed that there are 72,000 ministerial cars in use by politicians of all ranks. In Italy, these are known as "auto blu" and in recent years have come to symbolize the absurd privileges politicians give themselves using tax payer's money. The article went on to do a comparative study with the UK and discovered that there are only 296 "auto blu" available to British politicians!!Continuing with this embarassing study, the article calculated that the overall maintenance and driver costs for the British government amounted to £7 million. In Italy? Around 1,000,000,000 Euros.

How can this be? The answer is simple: The Italian Government is not an instution whose goal is to serve the people. Rather, it is a mechanism through which favours can be dispersed, rents and bribes can be obtained and personal interests pursued. It serves the interests of a few elites to such an obvious degree that I struggle to find parallels with any other Western democracy, with the exception of Greece.

At a time when the government is asking the people to make sacrifices and "roll up their sleeves" to survive the current crisis, the government should start by setting an example and cutting absurd spending. But then again, that would mean working towards the public good, and I doubt most politicians can remember what that means.