This isn’t how a minister talks.
I realised it the moment I heard the clip from Atreju crackle through my laptop speakers, the crowd’s applause buzzing like white noise behind that one sentence: “Siete sempre dei poveri comunisti.” I was in Tirana, coffee going cold on the desk, cursor blinking on an empty document, and for a second, I honestly thought it was an old Berlusconi video resurfaced by some nostalgic fan club. Instead, it was the Minister of University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini.
The smell of burnt coffee and cheap stage microphones mixed in my head.
Because if this is how you talk to students who are afraid for their future, we’ve got a serious problem that goes way beyond one minister.
Three Comfortable Lies We’re Being Sold
Let’s start from three ideas that I’m sure you’ve heard repeated, maybe at a family lunch, maybe in a TV debate with that familiar background jingle. The first says: “Students who protest are spoiled, they just don’t want to study.” The second goes: “If they shout at a minister, the minister has every right to answer even worse.” The third is the classic line: “This government is on the side of the people; it listens to problems.”
All three sounded painfully loud while the Atreju stage lights hit Bernini’s face and a group of medicine students, from the dark stalls, shouted their fear: “Non ce la facciamo più, con il semestre filtro rischiamo di perdere un anno.” You can almost hear the echo in the marquee, the plastic chairs scraping as people twist around to see who’s daring to disturb the show.
Now let’s flip those three ideas using a single story, a single number, and a single uncomfortable takeaway.
The Night At Atreju: When Power Chose Mockery
The story is simple, and that’s exactly what makes it ugly. At a political festival branded by Fratelli d’Italia, Bernini is on stage to talk about the “alliance for knowledge,” while some medicine students show up to contest the new “semestre filtro” system. They aren’t there for a selfie; they’re worried about a reform that ties their enrolment in medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine to passing three tough exams—chemistry, physics, and biology—within three months, with the real risk of burning an entire academic year.
They shout that they’re exhausted; they talk about panic attacks, about people who are already thinking about quitting or worse, about suicide, because they feel trapped in a limbo. That’s not the noise of a spoilt generation; that’s the raw sound of anxiety in a hall that still smells of new plastic and cheap popcorn. And what does the minister answer from the lit stage, microphone in hand, safe, amplified, cheered by the party crowd? “Sapete come diceva il presidente Berlusconi? Siete sempre dei poveri comunisti. Prima di contestare fatemi parlare. Questo dimostra la vostra inutilità.”
So the first lie falls: those students were not lazy. They were right on target.
The Number That Burns Through The Rhetoric
Here’s the number: ten percent. Roughly one out of ten students passed the first medicine access test linked to the reform; the rest hit a wall, also because of very little time to prepare and, in some cases, because of unclear or even wrong questions. The result is so embarrassing that the ministry is now considering admitting to the ranking even those who didn’t reach a passing score, with some sort of later recovery test, just to avoid empty places in medicine.
To fix the mess in physics, Bernini herself admits that there were at least two wrong questions and promises to give one extra point to everyone. The sound of that announcement, if you listen closely, is not the sound of competence; it’s the squeak of someone moving the goalposts in the middle of the match. Students and some law firms are already preparing legal action against a system that changes selection criteria mid‑way, multiplying confusion and inequalities.
So the second lie falls: if you design a bad reform, the problem isn’t those who protest loudly from the back row. The problem sits at the government table, in front of the bright desk lamps, where you sign decrees without listening.
“Poveri Comunisti”: When A Minister Forgets She’s A Minister
Here’s where the takeaway hits. A minister doesn’t speak only as Anna Maria, or as a party member under the warm yellow light of a friendly festival. A minister speaks as the State, with all the weight of the institution behind every word, even when the microphone hisses and the crowd is whistling. That’s exactly what Andrea Moccia, director of Geopop, pointed out: a minister can’t talk like that to a single citizen, not for a question of politeness, but for a question of substance.
When Bernini says “Siete inutili” to those students, she’s not just insulting three kids with banners and sweaty hands; she’s shrinking the dignity of her role. When she jokes about “poveri comunisti,” she’s not only recycling an old Berlusconi catchphrase; she’s turning a legitimate protest into a cheap meme for the faithful audience, who clap without even hearing the students’ words clearly. The air smells of old slogans, not of fresh ideas about university.
So the third lie collapses: this government is not “on the side of the people” when those people dare to disagree. It is on the side of whoever remains quiet in the dark, clapping at the right time.
A Pattern, Not An Accident
If this were just a slip, we could chalk it up to a bad day and move on. But you and I know it’s not the first time we’ve seen this movie. A few months earlier, another minister, Matteo Salvini, publicly mocked a 21‑year‑old student who had protested against the bridge over the Strait, exposing him to online ridicule through his own social channels. Different stage, same background noise: the roar of power that confuses criticism with offence and answers with personal attacks rather than arguments.
Il manifesto calls Bernini’s behaviour exactly what it is: bullying. “Bernini bullizza gli studenti” is their headline, and it’s hard to disagree when you watch the video: a minister who, instead of explaining a reform that’s already collapsing under its own contradictions, decides to humiliate those who contest it. In the same breath in which she mocks them, she admits mistakes in tests, low scores, patchy fixes, and promises mysterious “completamenti di graduatoria” that sound more like a scramble than serious planning.
That’s not firmness. That’s weakness dressed up as aggression. And the Meloni government, with its constant frontal war on critics—students, NGOs, journalists—has built a style of power that smells more of fear than of strength.
University Is Not A Party Stage
There’s a detail that sticks with me—maybe because I’m an academic by training and I’ve spent more nights than I can count under the pale neon lights of physics departments. The university is supposed to be the place where you learn to ask hard questions without fear. It’s the one public space where doubt should ring louder than applause.
When those medicine students raise their voices against a reform that risks wasting a year of their life, they are doing exactly what the university taught them: they’re thinking critically, even if their voice cracks and their hands shake. When the Minister for that same university answers with “poveri comunisti” and “siete inutili,” she’s telling them, very clearly: your doubt is not welcome here. The air in that room thickens, like chalk dust in a classroom where windows never open.
So we end up with an upside‑down world: the students are more loyal to the spirit of the university than the minister who runs it.
From Physics To Politics: Why This Matters
I usually write about stars, galaxies, black holes. To explain them, I strip away technical language, I simplify concepts that in research papers fill pages of equations. I’m doing the same here with politics and institutions—because the story, at its core, is not complex at all.
On one side you have young people who point out very concrete problems: wrong test questions, scores so low that only 10 percent get through, anxiety and confusion about their future. On the other side you have a minister who first insults them, then half‑admits the errors and promises patched‑up remedies like extra points and emergency admissions, while party colleagues clap along as if everything were a great show. Strip away the slogans, and what remains is a government that treats citizens’ worries as background noise to be mocked, not as data to improve policy.
You don’t need a PhD in physics to see that this way of governing is unstable. It wobbles like a bad experiment repeated with the same flawed setup, hoping for a different result.
A Government Afraid Of Questions
Here’s the thing that scares me the most, speaking as someone who lives off questions, both in science and in life. A power that insults those who question it is a power that’s already afraid. It fears that if it sits down to talk in a quiet room, away from the bright stage lights and friendly applause, its arguments will crumble like dry plaster under your fingers.
A democratic minister—any minister, of any party—should have done the exact opposite at Atreju. She should have stopped, lowered the tone, invited two or three students on stage, and in that slightly stuffy smell of cables and sweat, started from their stories: “Tell me calmly what’s not working for you.” Instead, we got the old Berlusconi punchline recycled as a weapon against twenty‑year‑olds without microphones.
When that becomes normal, when we shrug and say “ah, it’s just politics,” we’re giving this government permission to treat all of us like that: as useless, poor something.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for or which banner to wave. That choice is yours, and it should stay that way, made in silence behind a curtain that smells faintly of dust and old ink. What I will tell you, as Gerd, the guy in the wheelchair who left Rimini for Tirana and still spends evenings reading test reforms instead of watching Netflix, is this: don’t normalise contempt.
When a minister calls students “poveri comunisti” and “inutili,” that sound should ring in your ears longer than the crowd’s applause. When a government patches up its own mistakes on entrance exams with last‑minute fixes, that number—ten percent—should stick like a bad note in the back of your throat. And when someone tries to convince you that those who protest are the real problem, remember the scene at Atreju: the powerful on stage, lit and protected; the worried ones below, in the dark, shouting just to be heard.
The future, if it has any hope, is with the ones who ask questions, not with the ones who answer with insults.
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