Venice needs Venexit

Some of Venice’s problems are well known: the challenge of conserving her famous buildings, the dangers of poorly managed mass tourism — not to mention the fact that the city might well simply drown, a threat made all the more obvious by last week’s floods, the worst in 50 years. Since 1987 billions have been spent on the Mose project, a still unfinished and controversial system of underwater dams intended to protect the city from flooding. The authorities have repeatedly shifted the completion date: 1995, 2012, 2016 and now 2021. Venetians suspect these delays were just attempts to hide serious faults. They view the most recent floods as a clear sign of a major dysfunction in the way the city is politically managed.

But while the devastation of the floods may have caught the attention of the global media, less known to the outside world is the existential threat of depopulation, which may well soon extinguish Venice as a living city. No mayor of Venice has ever effectively attempted to reverse this fatal trend. Over the past 50 years the population has fallen from 150,000 to about 50,000 today, while the number of people living on the city’s mainland suburbs around Mestre has risen to 180,000. Mainlanders now outnumber Venetians by three to one, leading to what the UK-based charity Venice In Peril flagged as ‘a democratic emergency’.

Venice is no longer under the control of its inhabitants and it lacks an institution which could really defend it. For this reason, it’s holding its own referendum on separating from its mainland annexe on 1 December — and this is why the result of the ‘Venexit’ vote is so very important.