Europeans, Vote! A Lesson In Democracy From My Non-Political Nonna

-Essay-

NAPLES — When she was alive, my grandmother would always ask me to accompany her to vote. She stopped her education after finishing elementary school, and she lived her whole life in the working-class Neapolitan neighborhood of Rione Sanità. She had three daughters and a son, and she managed to get them all to obtain a university degree.

She did not care for politics, while she did care for everyday, simple stuff: making ends meet with her pension going to church together with her friends from the “vicolo” (narrow street), looking after her grandchildren a lot, and taking care of herself just a tiny bit. This was her life as a wife, mother, grandmother and housekeeper.

I think she was quite satisfied with it, but I guess that’s not the kind of question her generation asked, being more busy living life than commenting on it. Dictatorship, war, poverty, the post-war period and the reconstruction. She lived through those decades with few certainties and surely a lot of doubts, which she never shared with us.

The importance of choice

My grandmother didn’t have a political conscience. When the adults would fight over who to vote for, I never heard her intervene. She was taught that politics was not for women — or that at least it was not for her.

The only information I would get on her voting intentions was that it was necessary to go vote, otherwise it would be once again like it was when she was a teen: with other people taking advantage of the situation to do as they wished, while the common people suffered the consequences of their choices. It is a position that, to this day, I consider of a universal scope from an ethical standpoint.

She would tell me of when, under Italy’s Fascist regime, she had to give away her wedding ring, which my grandfather gave her on the day of their wedding — the only piece of gold she owned and proudly guarded. To replace it, they gave her one made of iron: It didn’t feel like an act of patriotism but of fraud — my grandmother understood that right away. Maybe it was the memory of that shame, that humiliation, that motivated her to go vote as long as she could.

If we don’t choose, someone else will do it for us.

It is for this reason that we have to vote: If we don’t choose, someone else will do it for us, people with whom we wouldn’t even want to go out for coffee in real life.

Imperfect representation

Perfect representation does not exist. But it is still possible to identify oneself with some fundamental values and principles: democracy, freedom and antifascism. Because Italian President Sergio Mattarella is a good person, and we love him. Because school, healthcare and labor cannot be summarized by a party’s symbol that voters draw an x on. Because they have to do with our everyday life.

Because oftentimes we take the constitution for granted, but then we take to the streets to defend it when they threaten to change it. Because when history gets messy and wars appear on the horizon, we all have a duty to respond with our presence.

Because children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to remember that day when we woke up, put “the” good dress on and showed up to draw an x, smiling afterwards. Because once they take away your wedding ring, there’s no going back.

Ritual of a ballot

My grandmother never missed an election, at least not that I know of. It was an important date for her, she would always mark it with a red circle on her evangelical calendar. The other red circles were for the rosary with friends in the “vicolo,” prayers on the first Friday of the month, the birthday of us grandchildren, and mass for my grandfather, who had left her a widow for many years, but not alone.

She wanted to take her time.

On election day, she would wear “the” good dress, and look several times inside her bag to check that her ballot paper and her ID were still there. When she walked inside the polling station she was a bit shy. But her head always held high, because the act of voting — in Italy, of drawing an x on the symbol of the political party you support — meant that there was at least one thing in the world that also depended on her.

When she entered the voting booth, it almost seemed that she would come out again. She wanted to take her time, in order to avoid mistakes. She would emerge, her forehead a bit shiny, but her hair were always in order. Then she would hand her ballot, which she diligently folded like the white sheets on her bed, to the poll worker, who would usually be the grandchild of one of her “vicolo” friends. She smiled.