Per quanto il ricorso vertesse sostanzialmente su una materia procedurale, ovvero l’ammissibilità o meno di un giudizio sulla condotta di uno stato sovrano da parte di un altro stato sovrano, l’attenzione e l’oggetto del pubblico dibattito si sono concentrate sulla tutela dei diritti umani che invero rappresentavano la ratio e non l’oggetto della condotta in esame.

Questo elemento è stato talmente sentito da tutti gli attori in causa al punto che la Corte, al paragrafo 99 della sentenza, ha ritenuto di dover rimproverare la condotta tedesca auspicando uno sviluppo dei negoziati tra i due paesi ed il governo tedesco, per il tramite del suo delegato diplomatico, nemmeno mezz’ora dopo la lettura della sentenza ha sottolineato l’interesse della Germania per la tutela dei diritti umani e lasciato aperta la possibilità di una soddisfazione delle richieste dei familiari delle vittime naziste attraverso le negoziazioni.

Ciò che la Corte ha quindi sentenziato con chiarezza è che nel Diritto Internazionale nessuno Stato sovrano può ergersi a giudice di un altro; a prescindere da ogni considerazione sul contenuto delle condotte in esame, anche se rappresentanti gravi violazioni di norme di diritto consuetudinario cogente.

La Corte, stabilendo l’obbligo di rispetto dell’immunità giurisdizionale degli stati e dunque l’illiceità del mezzo utilizzato per ottenere i risarcimenti, non ha quindi voluto colpire la posizione dei familiari delle vittime e la tutela dei diritti umani ma le ha anzi ulteriormente legittimate, esprimendo la propria “sorpresa e rammarico” per il diniego tedesco alle riparazioni.

In conclusione, la ripresa dei negoziati sembra rappresentare la via maestra per rispondere alle istanze delle vittime nel rispetto del diritto internazionale considerando che un’ulteriore controversia, avente direttamente ad oggetto il riconoscimento delle riparazioni, non potrebbe che non passare per una revisione storica dell’applicazione dei trattati di Roma e Bonn del 1961.

Quando lo si prende in mano, si può pensare di tutto, tranne che sia un libro brillante ed avvincente.
Infatti, anche se si legge che l’autore è Carlo Lucarelli, una copertina così cupa e l’impaginazione più che banale possono solo suscitare un senso di repellenza ed il libro viene lasciato lì in disparte. Però, dopo un po’, ci si domanda: “Come fa un libro di Lucarelli a non essere avvincente?”
Ed allora il lettore lo prende in mano cominciando a sfogliarlo e nota che sono presenti tutte le caratteristiche che fanno i romanzi di Lucarelli unici nel loro genere, ovvero: stile brillante, suspense, un pizzico di sentimentalismo e la presenza di un narratore onnisciente che intreccia e scioglie la trama del romanzo con notevole destrezza. E dire, però, che c’è un’anomalia ovvero la scenografia non è più, come di consuetudine, l’Italia degli anni Novanta, ma l’Italia del Duce, o meglio degli ultimi giorni della Repubblica di Salò. Infatti, è nel gran càos di quegli ultimi giorni che avviene un omicidio nei quartieri “alti”. Le indagini vengono affidate al commissario De Luca, sull’andamento delle quali fa una certa pressione il Questore.
C’è, infatti, in questi ultimi giorni di fascismo, un tentativo da parte della classe dirigente di salvarsi la pelle a scapito degli altri “colleghi”. In questo clima ed in questo ambiente, De Luca è costretto ad indagare. Vengono a galla traffici finanziari illeciti, corruzioni e tutti gli scandali presenti nel mondo gerarchico. Il presunto colpevole sembra proprio far parte di quel mondo strano, ma…alla fine De Luca scopre che la verità è un’altra, molto più semplice. Ma non è finita qui, perché stanno arrivando gli Americani e De Luca è costretto a scegliere: finire il suo compito per poi essere fucilato dai partigiani o fuggire verso la salvezza? Ancora una volta, insomma, al lettore rimane quella sensazione che solo Lucarelli sa dare: si rimane spaesati, esterrefatti.
Leggere “Carta bianca” non è una semplice lettura, è un’esperienza.

Republicans are more conservative than at any time since their 1980 dismay about another floundering president. They are more ideologically homogenous than ever in 156 years of competing for the presidency. They anticipated choosing between Mitt Romney, a conservative of convenience, and a conviction politician to his right. The choice, however, could be between Romney and the least conservative candidate, Newt Gingrich.

Romney’s main objection to contemporary Washington seems to be that he is not administering it. God has 10 commandments, Woodrow Wilson had 14 points, Heinz had 57 varieties, but Romney’s economic platform has 59 planks — 56 more than necessary if you have low taxes, free trade and fewer regulatory burdens. Still, his conservatism-as-managerialism would be a marked improvement upon today’s bewildered liberalism.

Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.
Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.
His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal. And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.
Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”
Obama is running as Harry Truman did in 1948, against Congress, but Republicans need not supply the real key to Truman’s success — Tom Dewey. Confident that Truman was unelectable, Republicans nominated New York’s chilly governor, whose virtues of experience and steadiness were vitiated by one fact: Voters disliked him. Before settling for Romney, conservatives should reconsider two candidates who stumbled early on.
Rick Perry (disclosure: my wife, Mari Will, advises him) has been disappointing in debates. They test nothing pertinent to presidential duties but have become absurdly important. Perry’s political assets remain his Texas record and Southwestern zest for disliking Washington and Wall Street simultaneously and equally.
Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative. He endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures — food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.) Huntsman considers No Child Left Behind, the semi-nationalization of primary and secondary education, “an unmitigated disaster.” (Romney and Gingrich support it. Gingrich has endorsed a national curriculum.) Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.
Romney might not be a Dewey. Gingrich might stop being (as Churchill said of John Foster Dulles) a bull who carries his own china shop around with him. But both are too risky to anoint today.

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.

To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:

“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”

Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.

These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.

The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

Red carpets, honor guards and gun salutes are for garden-variety visiting politicians and monarchs: for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Cairo put on the kind of reception usually reserved for rock stars. Turkey’s Prime Minister was greeted at the airport by thousands of cheering fans, many holding aloft posters of their hero. Fusillades of flashbulbs turned night into day. Journalists eager for a quote thrust microphones into Erdogan’s face, but he was drowned out by the chanting throngs. “Erdogan! Erdogan! A real Muslim and not a coward,” went one incantation. Another: “Turkey and Egypt are a single fist.”
Totalitarian regimes routinely orchestrate massive, faux-spontaneous welcomes for visiting dignitaries, but the beleaguered interim administration in Cairo didn’t need to rent a crowd for Erdogan: the Turkish leader is genuinely popular across the Arab world. He was ranked the most admired world leader in a 2010 poll of Arabs by the University of Maryland in conjunction with Zogby International. His stock has soared higher still since the Arab Spring. In countries where young people have risen against old tyrannies, many cite Erdogan as the kind of leader they would like to have instead.
A good politician knows how to milk his moment: the Cairo visit was the first leg of Erdogan’s triumphant mid-September sweep through the newly liberated North African states. There were tumultuous welcomes, too, in Tunis and Tripoli. Then it was time for Erdogan to take a bow on the biggest stage. The trip culminated at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, where President Obama, ignoring Erdogan’s recent criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East and his flaming diplomatic row with Israel, lauded him for showing “great leadership” in the region.
It’s not every day that a U.S. President and the Arab street are of one mind. But like the throngs chanting Erdogan’s name (not all of them aware it is pronounced Erd-waan; the g is silent) in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Obama is hoping that the new governments emerging from the ashes of old dictatorships will look a lot like the one the Prime Minister has built over the past eight years. Erdogan has greatly enhanced Turkey’s international reputation, has reined in its once omnipotent military, has pursued economic policies that have trebled per capita income and unleashed new entrepreneurship, and has for the most part maintained a pro-West stance.
He has, it is true, also displayed an occasional autocratic streak, running roughshod over political rivals, tossing enemies into jail and intimidating the media. Many political analysts, in Turkey and the West, suspect his desire to rewrite the constitution is designed to amass more executive power. But to his admirers, these failings pale against his successes. Democratic, economically ascendant and internationally admired: as political templates go, Turkey’s is pretty irresistible to people shaking off decades of authoritarian, impoverishing rule — and for Westerners worried about what those people might do next.
But perhaps its greatest virtue, in the eyes of many Middle Eastern beholders, is that the Turkish model was forged by an Islamist: Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party — better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP — have traditionally drawn support from the country’s religious and conservative classes and are regarded with suspicion by secular absolutists. For Arab Islamists, Turkey’s success is proof that they can modernize their countries without breaking away from their religious moorings. Erdogan’s Western admirers see it the other way around: proof that political Islam needn’t be an enemy of modernity. And if any evidence were needed that Erdogan’s way leads to political success, the AKP won its third general election in June, by a landslide.
But can Erdogan’s way lead Egypt, Tunisia and Libya to the political stability and economic strength Turkey now enjoys? Erdogan claims to be ambivalent whether Arab states seek to emulate his success. “If they want our help, we’ll provide any assistance they need,” he told TIME in an interview during his visit to New York. “We do not have a mentality of exporting our system.” But he doesn’t deny reaching out to the potential leaders of the Arab Spring states: “I intentionally wanted to talk to the presidential candidates, the new political parties there, and I had the opportunity to get together with lots of people in order to grasp the situation.”

His message to them: be good Muslims, but make sure your constitution is, like Turkey’s, secular. “Do not fear secularism, because it does not mean being an enemy of religion,” he said in an interview on Egyptian TV. “I hope the new regime in Egypt will be secular.” This came as a shock to some in the Muslim Brotherhood, who retorted that they didn’t need lessons from the Turk. Feathers were soon smoothed, but the episode was a reminder that Turkish Islamism, rooted in a secular democratic tradition, is not so easily transplanted to societies where neither secularism nor democracy is well understood. The template, says Michael Werz, a Turkey expert at the Center for American Progress, “can be inspirational for Arab Islamist parties, but it can’t be a model.”
All the same, many politicians in the Arab Spring countries are plainly modeling themselves after the Turkish leader. “Erdogan wears a business suit, but he prays in the mosque. That is something we can identify with,” Essam Erian, a top leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, told me in Cairo in the summer. (There’s an obvious echo in the name of the Brotherhood’s new political arm: Freedom and Justice Party.) Abdelhamid Jlassi, a leader of Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda party was just as starry-eyed when I met him in Tunis a few days later. “Erdogan speaks our language,” he told me. “When he speaks, we listen.”
Ennahda has since won a large plurality in Tunisia’s first free elections, on Oct. 23, to form an assembly that will write a new constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood is expected to do just as well in elections scheduled beginning in late November. Libya is not expected to hold elections until the middle of next year, but there, too, Islamist groups are expected to be significant players. Where — and to whom — they look for inspiration could change the way the world views them.
The Ideal Islamist
for some western observers, the rise of political Islam conjures up visions of extremist, reactionary states, like Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran. That limited view informed the anxiety that greeted the AKP’s 2002 election victory. Even Turkish secularists feared Erdogan would seek to undo the separation of mosque and state that is the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey. They pointed to comments Erdogan made in the 1990s, as mayor of Istanbul, like this one: “Democracy is a tram that gets you to your destination, and then you get off.” Turkey’s decision not to participate in the 2003 Iraq war led to fears that Erdogan would take his country out of NATO and turn away from the West.
But AKP’s critics were wrong: Turkey didn’t become another Iran. Apart from a quiet repeal of a long-standing ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities last year, Erdogan’s policies have hardly been an assault on Ataturk’s secular legacy. (Domestic critics complain, however, of an Islamist agenda in the steep hiking of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes.) And far from drifting away from the West, Erdogan pushed harder than his secular predecessors for the ultimate Western endorsement: admission into the European Union, whose repeated cold-shouldering of Ankara says more about European hangups than Turkey’s qualifications. Erdogan tells TIME he is “still determined” to pursue E.U. membership but can’t help smiling at the irony that his country, once described as “the sick man of Europe,” is now economically ascendant, while many members of the club that won’t admit him are all but bankrupt.
From Zero Problems …
For all its Islamist leanings, the AKP government also reached out to Jewish Israel and the secular Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad; previous governments in Ankara had at best cool relations with Damascus. There were overtures, too, to neighbors in the Balkans and around the Black Sea, and even to Armenia, with which Turkey has long-standing historical hostilities. These were all consistent with a doctrine Erdogan and his Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, dubbed Zero Problems: Turkey would mend fences with all neighbors and make friends anew in the wider world.
It worked: Erdogan seemed to form a close bond with Assad, even inviting the Syrian dictator to vacation in Turkey. And Turkey quickly became Israel’s best friend in the Islamic world — that bar was, admittedly, low.
Zero Problems also served Turkey’s economic ambitions. Turkish entrepreneurs, nudged along by the government — but without the overwhelming financial backing of the state enjoyed by, say, Chinese companies — were able to rapidly grow business in the immediate neighborhood and farther afield, notably in Africa. Turkish construction companies in particular fanned out across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, competing with (and often beating) Chinese rivals.

There was prosperity at home too: since the AKP first came to power, Turkey’s GDP has trebled, the budget deficit has fallen by two-thirds. From 2002 to ’10, GDP grew by a compounded annual rate of 4.8%, more than Russia, Brazil and South Korea. In 2010, Turkey’s GDP grew 8.9%; the E.U.’s grew 1.9%. Already the world’s 17th largest economy, behind South Korea, Spain and Canada, Turkey is expected to slow this year, and some analysts warn that its economy is in danger of overheating. But compared with much of Europe, it is a picture of health.
Emboldened by economic and foreign policy successes, Erdogan grew more ambitious abroad. With U.S. support, he sought to turn Turkey into a moderator of other regional rifts, bringing Syria and Israel as close as they have ever come to peace talks. That dream was dashed in December 2008, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered the start of Operation Cast Lead, a three-week assault on Gaza that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead. Israel said it was provoked by rockets fired from Gaza; Syria withdrew from Erdogan-brokered negotiations.
Associates of the Turkish leader say he was personally affronted. Olmert, he felt, had left him holding the bag. His anger boiled over at a panel discussion in Davos, when he stormed off after telling Israeli President Shimon Peres, “You know very well how to kill.”
Relations with Israel limped along for a while before breaking down completely in May 2010, when Israeli commandos halted a Turkish-led aid flotilla bound for Gaza. In international waters, the commandos rappelled down into the Mavi Marmara, a ship belonging to a Turkish charity. In the fighting that broke out, eight Turks and one Turkish American were killed. Israel says its soldiers were attacked on board.
Turkey has since all but broken off relations with Israel. Erdogan says nothing short of a formal apology and the lifting of Israel’s blockade of Gaza will repair a once promising friendship. “The Israeli government is not being honest at all,” he tells TIME. Israel has responded with angry rhetoric of its own: Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested one way to get back at Erdogan would be to support the Kurdish terrorist group known as the PKK, which has recently stepped up attacks against Turkish military and civilian targets. (Turkey accepted Israel’s aid after a devastating Oct. 23 earthquake in Van province killed over 600, but Davutoglu said that would not soften Turkey’s position.)
… To Plenty of Problems
The Arab Spring finally made the Zero Problems doctrine untenable. Although Erdogan was ahead of many Western leaders in calling for Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to step down in the face of a popular uprising, he was hesitant to send the same message to Syria’s Assad and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi: Turkey had sizable business interests and expat populations in both countries. Erdogan initially resisted pressure to join the NATO campaign against Gaddafi and maintained that his relationship with Assad would allow him to coax the Syrian leader into implementing political reforms. “Erdogan thought of himself as Assad’s tutor,” says F. Stephen Larrabee, an expert on Turkey at the Rand Corp. “He overestimated his ability to persuade Assad.”
Erdogan belatedly changed his mind and then acted decisively: Turkey backed Libya’s transitional council against Gaddafi, and once Assad had reneged on his promise of reforms (another slight Erdogan took personally), it began calling for regime change in Damascus. Whereas once he had invited the Assad family to holiday in Turkey, Erdogan grew openly contemptuous of the Syrian strongman. “It is impossible to preserve my friendship with people who are allegedly leaders when they are attacking their own people,” he says. Turkey now provides shelter not only to refugees from Assad’s crackdown but also to opposition groups that are actively plotting his downfall.
The break with Israel and Syria may have dashed Erdogan’s hopes of being a regional peacemaker. It also greatly complicates matters for the U.S., which had hoped Turkey could gradually draw Syria away from the Iranian sphere of influence. Nor does it help that the U.S.’s two closest allies in the region, Turkey and Israel, are now at loggerheads. Pro-Israel Congressmen have threatened to block military supplies to Turkey, giving the White House yet another brush fire to put out.

The consequences for Turkey are uncertain. Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric plays well with the AKP voter base and Arab audiences. But by turning on Assad, says Rand’s Larrabee, Erdogan also risks antagonizing Syria’s sponsor, Iran. Relations with Tehran have already cooled since Turkey agreed in September to install new NATO radar systems designed to detect missiles launched from Iran. Erdogan long pushed back against the radars for fear of antagonizing the Iranians. Now Turkish officials are seeking cover behind the fig leaf that data from the systems will not be shared with Israel; NATO says that’s just not true. So much for Zero Problems.
The New Ottoman Empire
Inevitably, Erdogan’s new foreign policy doctrine, aimed at increasing Turkey’s political and economic influence in the Middle East and North Africa, has been dubbed “neo-Ottoman,” after the dynasty that ruled much of the Muslim world from Istanbul for 600 years until shortly after World War I. Erdogan doesn’t shirk from the comparison. “Of course, the empire had some beautiful parts and some not-so-beautiful parts,” he says. “It’s a very natural right for us to use what was beautiful about the Ottoman Empire today.” Turkish officials envision an arrangement similar to the British Commonwealth, with a constellation of Balkan, East European and Arab states all looking to Istanbul for benign guidance.
But invoking a long-gone — and not especially lamented — empire is no basis for foreign policy. The competition for influence in the new Middle East emerging from the Arab Spring is bound to be fierce. Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the region’s traditional powers; there are American and European fingers in the pie too. Relative newcomers China and India have a growing economic interest in the region. Turkey’s head start in the Arab Spring countries — it is already one of the largest investors in Egypt and Libya — will be difficult to maintain.
If there’s growing competition for Turkey abroad, for Erdogan there are also growing problems at home. That autocratic tendency has become more pronounced since June’s huge election win. Political rivals complain that he has never quite shaken off the bullying streak he developed in the mean streets of Istanbul’s Kasimpasa neighborhood. Despite his lofty position, he rarely misses a chance to rub his opponents’ noses in the dirt, often using crude rhetoric unbecoming of a leader who aspires to statesmanship. He is notoriously thin-skinned about criticism and paranoid about coups. (This last is perhaps understandable: the Turkish military overthrew four elected governments in the 40 years before the AKP’s 2002 victory.) For all its desire for Turkey to be seen as a modern state equal in freedoms to any in Europe, his government has jailed 68 journalists, accusing them of complicity in coup plots. On a recent trip to Istanbul, two top journalists agreed to talk with me about Erdogan only if I promised not to name them.
Erdogan’s treatment of Turkey’s Kurdish minority had fluctuated between promises of political compromise and old-fashioned military repression. Violence has flared in recent months after a series of tit-for-tat attacks between the PKK and Turkish forces. Sezgin Tanrikulu, deputy chairman of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, scoffs at Erdogan’s international popularity: “Before Turkey can be held up as a role model for the Middle East, it needs to sort out its own domestic conflicts.”
Conflicts in the neighborhood will have an impact on Turkey’s economy: trade with Syria, a major partner, is imperiled by Erdogan’s open falling out with Assad. The longer the dictatorship lingers in Damascus, the greater the cost. Antagonistic relations with Israel have not yet had a great economic effect, mainly because trade between the two countries is relatively small.
In the political arena, Erdogan’s next challenge is to rewrite the Turkish constitution. Fears that he will dilute Turkey’s secularism have been replaced by a growing concern that he will push for executive power to be concentrated in the office of the President, and then seek that office himself. The Turkish presidency is currently a mostly ornamental position, held by Erdogan’s longtime ally Abdullah Gul. Istanbul salons are rife with talk of the two men switching roles after the constitution is rewritten, drawing inevitable comparisons to the Medvedev-Putin swap in Moscow. It’s a testament to how far the Islamist icon has come that his critics no longer worry that he may turn Turkey into another Iran. They now fear he will turn it into another Russia.

1. Cosa è stato fatto fino ad oggi per determinare costi e benefici del progetto di recupero del teatro?
2. Come si intende finanziare il progetto? Ritenete opportuno utilizzare denaro pubblico (statale od europeo) e se sì a chi spetterebbero la proprietà e la gestione del teatro?
3. Anni fa, sacrificando parte della facciata del Teatro, sono stati costruiti alcuni appartamenti: in che modo il progetto di recupero riuscirà a far coesistere nella stessa struttura teatro, accademia, locale notturno e residenze?
4. Se l’intenzione della Famiglia Talin è quella di privilegiare il bene della comunità perché nel Piano Regolatore Generale sono state previste strutture residenziali o commerciali al posto del teatro?
5. Ferme restando le intenzioni della Famiglia Talin e data la normativa regionale (L.R. 11/2004), che prevede la possibilità di perequazioni (art. 35) e compensazioni urbanistiche (art. 37), è politicamente considerabile l’apposizione di un vincolo d’esproprio sul teatro tramite l’adozione di una variante del Piano Regolatore Generale?

Mi piace pensare che questo impegno sia frutto di una lungimirante visione politica e sociale.
Mi piace pensare che su queste importanti e solide fondamenta, le prossime amministrazioni riescano a guidare con altrettanta lungimiranza un nuovo corso di sviluppo.

Per fare ciò c’è bisogno di idee, di progetti ambiziosi ma concretizzabili un passo per volta con le persone giuste.
E credetemi, non è solo un sogno.
Solo ora che vivo fuori Valdagno per gran parte della settimana sono realmente consapevole delle grandi potenzialità del nostro territorio.
Siamo una città di quasi 30000 abitanti, con un livello di cultura sopra la media nazionale e un’ottima qualità della vita.
Siamo circondati dal verde, quando alziamo gli occhi vediamo le Piccole Dolomiti, eppure la storia ed in particolare un uomo di nome Gaetano Marzotto ci ha insegnato che qui è anche possibile realizzare grandi imprese e grandi sogni.
A cosa serve dunque cercare l’ “America” quando noi ci viviamo?

Le prossime elezioni dovrebbero così porre al centro del dibattito lo sviluppo della città.
La domanda a cui ogni candidato dovrebbe saper rispondere è questa: dove e come possiamo svilupparci?
Il Sindaco Neri ci ha già dato la sua visione: Valdagno in questi ultimi anni si è trasformata in città di servizi, e questo è il campo d’azione sul quale lo sviluppo risulterebbe più ovvio ed efficiente.
Ed ha anche fatto di più, ha messo in campo tre proposte iniziali: la costruzione di una SPA – centro benessere, di un parcheggio multipiano con annessa galleria commerciale e la realizzazione di un centro culturale – multimediale.
A mio avviso, sono soluzioni da accogliere con favore ed ottimismo ed ora ne spiego il mio perché.

La realizzazione di un centro benessere a Valdagno innanzitutto, non sarebbe fallimentare data la vicinanza delle Terme di Recoaro, come si è sentito dire dalle opposizioni.
Un centro benessere, in realtà, offre servizi che sono ben diversi da un centro dedicato a cure termali: è un luogo dove diversi tipi di utenza vanno per rilassarsi e prendersi cura di sé, diversamente dagli scopi medici che hanno le Terme di Recoaro.
A dire il vero, la vicinanza a queste può rappresentare un punto di forza reciproco. L’offerta del centro benessere, infatti, potrebbe essere completata (anche attraverso la formulazione di veri e propri pacchetti all – inclusive) da quella delle Terme, e viceversa.
E ancor di più, se intendiamo il Centro Benessere come l’inizio di una coraggiosa apertura del nostro territorio al turismo, allora lo si può ben dire: è una proposta geniale.
Ecco perché, signor Fongaro, può iniziare a veder bene la realizzazione del centro benessere a Valdagno.
Con la stessa ambizione, la realizzazione di un centro culturale – multimediale a Valdagno potrà davvero diventare il simbolo del nuovo sviluppo valdagnese.
Ho partecipato ai lavori di Agorà dei Giovani: io ed altri studenti universitari e giovani professionisti (di diverso orientamento politico) abbiamo scritto una bozza progettuale che prossimamente andremo a condividere ed arricchire attraverso il confronto con la cittadinanza.

È stato anche l’entusiasmo portato da questa esperienza che mi spinge a scrivere questa lettera: ho potuto comprendere che non sono il solo a sognare e a voler rimboccarmi le maniche per una città migliore, dinamica e aperta alla sfida globale.
Più mi confronto con la gente valdagnese e più si rafforza in me la convinzione che gran parte della città non guarda più nostalgica al passato ma speranzosa al futuro.
La gente vuole una classe dirigente capace d’ispirare un nuovo sviluppo, di cui saranno poi i cittadini stessi ad esserne protagonisti con il loro lavoro quotidiano.
Quanto dunque ci si aspetta è una campagna elettorale intensa, carica di sogni compensati da proposte concrete ed illuminanti.

Alberto Neri sta seguendo questa strada sin dal primo giorno del suo mandato e ci chiede di poter continuare a farlo, e gli altri?
Non nascondo la mia delusione nel leggere le considerazioni delle minoranze.
Quanto noi cittadini, giovani e non, ci aspettiamo da loro è un progetto di sviluppo alternativo e ancora più convincente di quello su cui Neri sta lavorando.
Troppo difficile? Non importa, non si può amministrare la città senza idee e progetti.
Le opposizioni dovrebbero accettare in pieno la sfida dello sviluppo e smettere di criticare senza fornire motivazioni serie e senza il seguito di una proposta.
Mi vengono in mente, a proposito, le affermazioni di Vittorio Vencato del PdL riguardo, a suo dire, la scarsa attenzione dell’amministrazione allo sport: cosa sarebbero dunque la risistemazione della pista di atletica e dell’ex-galoppatoio e la costruzione del PalaLido?
Mi consenta, signor Vencato, non siamo degli imbecilli.

Tutto questo per ribadire a chi vuol rappresentarci che quanto noi giovani vogliamo per la nostra città, per il nostro paese e per il mondo sia lavorare per donare ai nostri figli una società migliore di quella che abbiamo trovato, esattamente come i nostri padri, tra i quali Gaetano Marzotto, fecero per noi.

Questo intervento, pubblicato sul Giornale di Vicenza, suscitò molte reazioni in città. Nei mesi a seguire ebbi poi modo di collaborare nella campagna elettorale di Alberto Neri. Mi resi conto, molto amaramente, di aver mal riposto la mia fiducia in loro. Ma la sostanza non cambia: questa è la mia idea per Valdagno ed in quel momento storico Neri ne era il miglior interprete politico possibile.