What if we did more than retweet flags, and actually took to the streets? (With the help of parties)

For once, probably not the only time, though I don’t want to sound like the nationalist I am not, Italy may have done something that could serve as an example to the European Union: a popular demonstration in support of the idea

On 15 March 2025, a cheerful meeting of citizens in support of the European project was held in Rome. It was a remarkable success, although very naive and lacking an agenda, full of contradictions about the role the Union should play. However, it mobilised thousands of people in defence of an idea; the content, then, it was hoped, would come.

 Now the Union is truly under attack, from Russia, from close allies, the United States, and from fierce and undemocratic commercial operators like China. An attack that is military in the sense of real military planes illegally flying over our skies, if someone did not want to consider the murderous attack on Ukraine as an attack, also, perhaps above all, on the European Union. A cyber attack, with entire computer systems being blocked, a misinformation attack, and this only from Russia.

Then there are the United States, which have explicitly abandoned us, which have lined up—as we have always warned in this newspaper—alongside Moscow, and which now, in black and white, write that the Union must die. And it must die, this is the truth, not because it is weak, but because it is strong, and because it can become even stronger.

Finally, there is China, which wants to keep us by the throat with the raw materials it possesses, with the floods of goods it can use to pulverize our market. They don’t shoot at us; they do the bare minimum in hacking, but they want to “strip us to the bone” with the power of commerce.

Good, I mean, bad. Yet, if all this is true, if it is true that yesterday, strolling past the shop windows or sipping a hot chocolate in front of the fireplace (those who have one) or watching TV nice and warm, we heroically retweeted the European flag (which, personally, I always regard with a certain caution, even the European one that we also retweeted as a newspaper), then perhaps we are ready to take one step further: to go out on the square across Europe, as Europeans, to say (if the Eurobarometer polls are true) that we believe in this project, that we want our place as a democracy in the world, that we have a way of life that we value and that we neither want to arm ourselves to the teeth nor deprive ourselves of the many freedoms we enjoy. And that we are ready to defend it.

 I don’t want to be rhetorical, to speak about “millions of dead” (which there have indeed been) or about great dreamers like Spinelli or Monnet; I want to defend a system in which I can freely write this newspaper, I can profess the religion or democratic political creed I want, I can travel, study, read the books I prefer. To say that I want to vote freely, without tricks or without deceit. To say that the incredible economic growth we have had in recent decades must continue, giving more, especially to those who have less. 

And here the European democratic parties must help. The Populars, the Socialists, the Liberals, the Greens, the Left, maybe even some Conservatives must help us to say publicly, in the streets, that this project exists; that we still believe in it; that it is a project of freedom that we do not want to be stolen from us.