Who powers it?

Every civilisation tells the story of progress through its visible works: schools, hospitals, railways, universities, factories, digital networks. More rarely does it tell what makes their functioning possible. Behind every modern right there is a material infrastructure. Behind every public service there are energy, skills, maintenance, investment, organisation and production.

A society can debate redistribution at length, but it can only redistribute what it manages to produce.

This is the point that Italian political debate tends to remove. Energy supply is treated as a sectoral matter, to be handed to specialists or used during emergencies. Rarely is it presented for what it really is: the backbone of economic sovereignty.

Energy is not an accessory line in the productive system. It is the condition that precedes almost all the others. It determines the cost of industries, the stability of grids, the ability to attract investment, the security of households, the operation of data centres, the competitiveness of agriculture, transport and services. Even artificial intelligence, often described as something immaterial, depends on plants, electrical grids, semiconductors, cooling systems and a continuous supply of power.

In 2024 the European Union still met about 57% of its energy needs through net imports. Italy shows a particularly high structural dependence and a mix in which natural gas continues to carry significant weight.

Depending on foreign supply does not necessarily mean being weak. Modern economies live on interdependence. Weakness arises when there is no strategy: when one imports without diversifying, closes plants without building alternatives, announces transitions without building networks, storage and productive capacity, or claims to separate environmental policy from industrial policy.

The energy transition is not a choice between the past and the future. It is the difficult task of guaranteeing the present while building the future.

It requires renewables, storage, smarter grids, interconnections, dispatchable capacity, research, efficiency and a non-ideological discussion of all available technologies. Above all it requires political continuity. Energy infrastructure takes years or decades; a parliamentary term lasts much less. If every government rewrites its predecessor's strategy, the country does not carry out a transition: it oscillates.

The same inability to think long-term concerns the relationship between economic growth and civilisation.

We sometimes speak of the welfare of the Northern European countries as if it were born of a particular moral superiority. But welfare does not float above the economy. It is sustained by labour, productivity, declared incomes, competitive firms, trust in institutions and administrative capacity. It is not the opposite of growth: it is one of the most advanced ways in which a productive society turns part of its wealth into collective security.

Productivity measures how much wealth is generated through the labour and capital employed. It does not say everything about wellbeing, but without productivity growth it becomes very hard to stably finance wages, pensions, healthcare, schooling and social protection.

The most advanced countries are not those that have eliminated the State. They are those that have made the State capable. The difference is not between public and private, but between structures that enable and structures that block. A modern administration sets comprehensible rules, checks quickly, punishes abuses and then lets people work. A weak administration multiplies pre-emptive authorisations because it lacks the capacity to verify results.

Italy, instead, continues to suffer from stagnant productivity, territorial gaps, low research spending and administrative obstacles that hold back small and medium enterprises above all. The European Commission itself, in its 2026 report on Italy, points to the reduction of bureaucratic burdens, to research and to a coherent industrial strategy as some of the steps needed to unlock the country's innovative potential.

Distributing incentives is not enough. Conditions must be built.

An incentive temporarily rewards a behaviour. Infrastructure makes that behaviour possible even when the incentive ends. A tax credit may convince a firm to invest today; reliable energy, swift justice, available skills and predictable procedures may convince it to stay for twenty years.

Italian politics tends to prefer the bonus because the bonus is immediately communicable. A power line, a storage network, an administrative reform or a technical training path, on the other hand, require time, conflict, maintenance and responsibility. They do not always produce an effective image for the electoral campaign. They produce something more important: national capacity.

Civil and economic progress advance together. Not because everything must be subordinated to profit, but because rights, when they become concrete, need people, means, buildings, energy and organisation.

The real political question is not how much welfare we wish to promise.

It is: who will power the system needed to maintain it?