Eleven days. That is the time that elapsed between the Geneva agreement — where on 17 February 2026 Americans and Iranians had agreed on guiding principles for a negotiated solution — and the first bombing of Operation Epic Fury, on 28 February. Eleven days in which someone decided that the military window was worth more than the diplomatic one. Diplomacy did not fail. It was interrupted. This distinction is not rhetorical: it has precise legal consequences. According to several international law scholars, an alliance whose first article enshrines the commitment to peaceful resolution of disputes cannot present its members with a war already under way and ask for collaboration. And yet that is exactly what happened.

We know the consequences. The Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas passes — closed. Not metaphorically: maritime traffic dwindled to a trickle. Around a thousand ships waited weeks to cross it. Brent crude surpassed a hundred dollars a barrel, approaching one hundred and twenty. Diesel exceeded two euros a litre at self-service pumps. Kerosene was rationed at northern airports — Bologna, Milan Linate, Venice, Treviso — from 4 April onwards. International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol described the situation as “the greatest threat to global energy security in history”: worse than the 1973 oil shock, worse than that of 1979, worse than the 2022 Russian gas crisis. Not one among many energy crises. The worst ever.

Faced with this, the world responded. Pakistan introduced a four-day working week for public employees and closed schools for two weeks. Vietnam issued a remote-work order. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency and shortened the working week. Australia saw its prime minister address the nation with a structured plan. Egypt decreed a mandatory remote-working day for the public sector. Malaysia, Indonesia, Slovenia: different measures, same logic. The European Commission sent a formal letter to all twenty-seven member states requesting, among other things, recourse to agile working for at least three days a week. The International Energy Agency published a ten-point emergency checklist for reducing oil demand. In first place, ahead of motorway speed limits, ahead of incentives for public transport: work from home wherever possible.

Observing how European countries did — or did not — move is instructive. France, which imports thirty-five per cent of its diesel through Hormuz, adopted demand-containment measures in the public sector. Spain, at forty per cent dependency, opened a national energy efficiency roundtable that explicitly included remote working among the options to be developed. Germany, the least exposed at twenty per cent, nonetheless issued recommendations to businesses to encourage smart working during periods of peak demand. None of these countries transformed the emergency into a structural right — let us be honest about that. But all of them at least acknowledged that the problem existed and that something had to be done.

Italy imports fifty-seven per cent of its diesel through Hormuz. It is the most exposed country in Europe by a considerable margin. It extended the fuel duty cut by one month.

Five hundred million euros. An expiry date: 1 May. No remote-working measure. No emergency energy plan presented to Parliament. No declaration naming mandatory commuting as a collective cost to be reduced. The Smart Workers Union wrote to the Government on 3 April. The FLP had written on 1 April. The FP CGIL had launched an urgent appeal. The CISL Emilia Centrale had calculated that eighty thousand workers in the Reggio Emilia area working remotely even just one day a week would have saved over three thousand six hundred barrels of oil per month. From Palazzo Chigi, no reply came.

Then, in the night between 7 and 8 April — after a day in which the President of the United States had written on Truth Social that “an entire civilisation will die tonight, and can never be brought back to life,” and in which Israeli fighter-bombers had already struck bridges in Kashan, Tabriz and Karaj killing at least two people — the two-week ceasefire arrived. Brokered by Pakistan, announced on Truth Social at eighteen thirty-two Eastern time. European stock markets responded with a rebound of between three and five per cent. Oil fell fourteen per cent in a single session. The spread narrowed. The newspaper headlines changed subject.

And with them, the urgency of doing something.

II.

There exists a distinctly Italian literary genre that we might call the rediscovery of hot water in times of crisis. It works like this: a crisis arrives. Someone discovers that there exists a tool — simple, rapid, cost-free — that could alleviate its effects. This tool is presented to the general public as though it were an invention of the moment, an unprecedented response to an equally unprecedented challenge. Roundtables are convened. Recommendations are formulated. Trade unions write letters. Newspapers publish graphs. Experts explain with the patience of those who already know how it ends. Someone cites the IEA figures. Someone else recalls — almost apologising for the obviousness — that back in 2022 the same conversation had taken place. And in 2020. And before that.

Then the crisis eases — or merely slows, if only by way of a fourteen-day ceasefire as fragile as a deal struck on Truth Social — and everything vanishes. It is not archived by a conscious decision. There is no communiqué announcing the end of the urgency. There is no decree revoking the measures, because the measures were never adopted. It simply evaporates, without anyone taking responsibility for having let it go. As though it had never been on the table. As though the next crisis were not coming. As though the next crisis were not already on its way.

With Covid it went exactly like this. In March 2020, within a matter of days, millions of Italian workers found themselves working from home for the first time. The transition was chaotic, improvised, without adequate tools and without any governing framework. Those who had a laptop opened it straightaway. Those who did not made do. Connections barely held. And yet the machine kept running. Productivity figures did not collapse — in many sectors they rose. The studies accumulated over those years — the most cited being the randomised controlled trial conducted by economist Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University on over sixteen hundred employees, published in Nature in 2024 — documented with precision that working from home two days a week produces no negative effects on productivity or on promotion prospects. They also documented an instructive detail: before the experiment, managers predicted on average that remote work would reduce productivity by 2.6 per cent. By the end of the experiment they had changed their minds. It was not the data that had persuaded them, since the data already existed. It was direct experience — which says a great deal about how rational, in the first place, the resistances we are analysing actually are.

The collapse came afterwards, when people returned to the office. As soon as reopening became possible, the trend reversed with the same speed at which it had begun. Not because productivity had fallen. Not because workers had asked to return. Because the system has its own gravitational pull. The full office as the natural state of things. The empty office as an exception to be justified. The percentage of smart-working employees in Italy fell from its pandemic peak with mechanical regularity. In 2026, according to data from the Politecnico di Milano Observatory, agile workers numbered around three and a half million, with growth of 0.6 per cent year on year. Three hundred and fifty thousand fewer than the 2020 peak. Growth of 0.6 per cent in the year of the worst energy crisis in history. Growth of 0.6 per cent in the year in which the IEA placed remote work at the top of its emergency plan. In any other country, that figure would have been the object of urgent public policy. In Italy it remained a figure in the Observatory’s report.

With the 2022 energy crisis, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it went exactly like this. For a few months remote work re-entered public discourse as an energy-saving tool. A ministerial circular was issued recommending that public administrations encourage recourse to smart working. Prices then stabilised, supplies reorganised themselves through alternative channels, and the subject disappeared again, silently, without anyone having to justify the silence. The circular had no structural follow-through. As though it had never been issued.

With Hormuz it is going exactly like this. The two-week truce has already removed the political pressure needed to do anything at all. Diesel remains above one euro ninety a litre. Birol told Le Figaro that seventy-five energy facilities in the Gulf region have been attacked and damaged, more than a third of them severely: repairs that will take three to five years. But the political window has already closed, with the same mechanical, impersonal, inexorable speed with which it opened.

Pandemic. Ukraine. Hormuz. Always temporary. Never structural.

There is a word for this pattern, and it is not “bad luck,” nor “unpreparedness,” nor even “inertia” — which at least has the merit of being passive. It is called choice. A choice that is never declared as such, precisely because it is never made consciously. It happens through progressive abandonment, through the gravitational force of a system that prefers the familiar to the effective, the habitual to the useful, the employer’s benevolent concession to the enforceable right. Crises open fractures in the order of things. The fractures close — if no one guards them with a rule, a right, a law that transforms the exception into the norm. The task of politics would be to guard them. In Italy, that guard is absent.

7 April 2026 is a date worth remembering, if only for its involuntary symbolic density. It is the day on which the President of the United States wrote on Truth Social that “an entire civilisation will die tonight.” It is also the day on which Italy produced its response to the most severe energy crisis in history: it made the failure to deliver a document — one that was already required by law — a criminal offence.

Law no. 34 of 11 March 2026 — the so-called Annual Law for SMEs, published in the Official Gazette on 23 March and entering into force on 7 April — introduced penalties for employers who fail to provide remote-working employees with the annual health and safety information notice: display screens, posture, eye strain, work-related stress. The obligation already existed, established under article 22 of Law 81 of 2017. The novelty is that anyone who now fails to deliver that document risks arrest for two to four months, or a fine of up to seven thousand four hundred euros.

Not three mandatory remote-working days. Not a structural right to agile working. Not an emergency measure for workers who burn diesel every morning to reach offices they need not have reached. An annual notice about display screens, with criminal sanctions. While Pakistan was decreeing the short week, while Egypt was introducing mandatory remote working by decree, while the European Commission was asking twenty-seven governments to act on the organisation of labour, Italy was busy making a pre-existing bureaucratic obligation more penalisable. This response says something precise about the system’s priorities: not the right, not the emergency, but bureaucratic compliance. Not the worker, but the document concerning the worker.

It is worth noting that on that same morning of 7 April, as the law came into force, the Minister of Education was being asked whether distance learning for schools might be considered as an energy-saving measure. The proposal had been put forward by the ANIEF trade union, and was already in operation in Dubai — where the Knowledge and Human Development Authority had extended remote schooling for all schools and universities at least until 17 April 2026, explicitly citing “a regional situation considered unstable from a security standpoint” — and in Lebanon, where the ministry had formalised distance learning with forty-minute lessons and constant monitoring. The response, verified and attributed by Adnkronos on 7 April 2026: “it is not contemplated in any way.” The statement is on record.

In the same period, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security was working on a gas emergency plan drafted in 2023 — designed for the Russian crisis, not for Hormuz, in an entirely different geopolitical context — attempting to adapt it to the current situation. No plan was presented to Parliament. None of the measures under consideration — smart working, alternate number-plate restrictions, reductions in public lighting, rationing of consumption in the most energy-intensive sectors — became a formal act of government. The Minister of Defence, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, had said with unusual frankness for a cabinet member: “in the space of a month a great deal could be brought to a halt.” A sentence that sounded like the premise of something. The premise never arrived.

The Prime Minister was in the Gulf on 3 and 4 April — the first Western leader to visit the region since the start of the conflict. A diplomatic positioning gesture, commendable in itself. Yet from that positioning no structural energy policy followed. No ministerial declaration nominating smart working as a response to the energy crisis appears in the public record of the period. Parliament voted on nothing in this area. The picture has the geometric coherence of a systematic absence: every piece in its place, no piece moving.

The silence of the major trade union confederations deserves a separate discussion, and it is a silence with its own explanations — but one worth examining. CGIL, CISL and UIL exist, among other reasons, to protect workers’ conditions and purchasing power. The energy crisis eroded both in a direct and measurable way: the cost of the daily commute rose by tens of euros a month for millions of workers. A structural response could have been a unified trade union platform demanding the right to remote work as a measure to defend real wages. It did not arrive. What arrived instead were scattered letters, uncoordinated urgent appeals, local proposals not joined up at a national level. Nothing resembling a unified position capable of opening a negotiation.

It is worth dwelling on the silence of the political left, because it is a silence with a specific quality. It is not the silence of those who do not know what to say. It is the silence of those who have stopped, over some decades, frequenting the political subject they are supposed to represent. The concrete worker — the one who pays for fuel, who works shifts, who every morning covers kilometres to sit down at a desk they need not have reached — is no longer at the centre of Italian progressive discourse. Their place has been taken by categories that are more visible, more photogenic, better suited to the logics of contemporary communication. All legitimate. None of them capable, alone, of building political representation rooted in the material interests of those who work, commute and pay for fuel.

This is not a conjunctural omission. It is the product of a thirty-year process during which part of the Italian left progressively substituted the analysis of interests with the management of identities. Politics as the practice of governing collective interests became, in some cases, politics as the practice of distinction. In this scheme, the commuter who burns diesel every morning does not fill squares, does not produce viral content, is not a community. And yet they are the subject who bears the most direct and measurable cost of every choice that is not made. Socialism was born to give voice to those who have none, to name the mechanisms of power, to render visible the hidden costs of the decisions of the powerful. At this moment, that voice is not heard.

As this essay goes to press, the truce is already under strain.

The Strait of Hormuz was reopened on the morning of 8 April, following the ceasefire. It remained open for a few hours. In the afternoon, after Israel launched the largest wave of bombing raids on Beirut since the start of the war — over two hundred and fifty dead, more than a thousand wounded, according to the Lebanese Civil Protection authority, and an Italian Unifil armoured vehicle hit by Israeli fire — Iran closed the strait again. The central condition of the truce, violated within hours.

The agreement exists, meanwhile, in two versions. The one published by Tehran in Persian included the clause on “acceptance of enrichment” of uranium. The one shared in English by Iranian diplomats with journalists did not. The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Ghalibaf — designated chief negotiator — declared that three of the ten points had already been “overtly and clearly violated,” and warned that “in this situation a bilateral truce and talks are unreasonable.” The Islamabad negotiations, initially set for Friday, slipped to Saturday. Vice President Vance will not attend for security reasons. Netanyahu declared: “Our finger is on the trigger, we are always ready for war.”

There is, however, a fact that transcends the fragility of this specific agreement, and that concerns Italy structurally. Even if the situation were to return fully to normal in future, Tehran is now aware of the power it has to create economic and geopolitical tensions by leveraging the strait. This power will not disappear with the signing of any treaty. It is a structural feature of the region’s new geopolitical order. Hormuz will never be, for Italy, what it was on 27 February 2026.

The stellone has provided. As always.

The stellone d’Italia — Italy’s lucky star — is a historiographical category with no precise equivalent in other European languages, and for good reason: it is a distinctly Italian phenomenon. It does not denote good fortune in the ordinary sense. It denotes something more specific and more unsettling: the structural luck of a country that survives systematically not through virtue — not through the quality of its institutions, not through the foresight of its ruling class, not through the soundness of its strategic choices — but through unearned grace. Something arrives, every time, to pull the chestnuts from the fire before the fire becomes a blaze. The country survives. And it systematically mistakes that grace for confirmation of its own indestructible vitality. It learns nothing because it has no need to learn: the stellone will provide next time too. The lesson of history, in Italy, is that there is no lesson.

The two-week ceasefire is the latest manifestation of this pattern. It did not arrive through the merits of Italian diplomacy, which played no role whatsoever in the talks. It arrived through Pakistan’s initiative, brokered by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, obtained an hour and a half before the ultimatum expired, with an agreement that already in its own terms carries the imprint of its own fragility. Formal negotiations begin Saturday in Islamabad. The agreement is a truce, not a peace. Then we shall see.

Meanwhile, what the truce has already accomplished is more subtle and more lasting than the newspaper headlines suggest. It has normalised a new geopolitical arrangement at Hormuz. The two-million-dollar toll per vessel — to be split between Iran and Oman, with the proceeds formally earmarked for reconstruction — is already in the terms of the agreement. It is the logic that both parties can present as a result: the United States can describe the agreement as a reopening of the strait, Iran can present it as recognition of its own operational control. Some analysts call this process the Suezification of Hormuz: the transformation of an internationally free waterway into a toll corridor, on the model of what Egypt obtained with the Suez Canal in 1956.

The Suez Canal has operated like this for seventy years. Egypt collects, ships pay, the cost ends up in the final price of goods. Nobody notices anymore because it has become an invisible part of the ordinary price structure. If Hormuz follows the same trajectory, every barrel passing through that strait will carry an embedded structural surcharge. Not because of the emergency: because of the new permanent arrangement. The difference from Suez is one of scale: Hormuz moves roughly twenty per cent of the world’s oil, Suez roughly twelve per cent of total global trade. A toll on Hormuz is not a tax on regional commerce. It is a tax on global energy.

The markets are already pricing this in. Oil fell fourteen per cent after the ceasefire, but remains thirty-one per cent more expensive than a year ago. The new normal toward which things are tending is structurally more expensive than the normality from which we started. The lorry driver filling up pays more. The family travelling by car pays more. The worker covering kilometres a day between home and office pays more. Not for a few weeks — for years. Not because the crisis is not over — because the new arrangement has embedded a permanent cost that cascades across fuel, utility bills, the price of transported goods, inflation. Those who absorb this cost are not large corporations, which have hedging instruments and alternative supply chains. They are families. They are workers. They are those who had no say when it was decided to do nothing.

For Italy, the arithmetic is particularly unsparing. The fifty-seven per cent of imported diesel that flowed through Hormuz will not return to pre-war prices. Not because the conflict will not end — it will, one way or another — but because the destroyed infrastructure requires years to rebuild, because the toll is already in the terms of the agreement, because the geopolitical risk of Hormuz has been definitively repriced by insurance markets and will not return to previous levels. Italy is the most exposed country in Europe. And in this more expensive new normal, mandatory commuting — the measure the IEA placed first on its checklist as the most urgent, simplest, zero-cost intervention — continues exactly as before. Because there is no law to counterbalance it. Because there is no right to limit it. Because the master still has his eye. And the stellone, this time, has only managed to postpone the problem.

The IEA, in its report Sheltering From Oil Shocks, calculates that three remote-working days per week could reduce national car-related petroleum consumption by between two and six per cent. Road transport accounts for roughly forty-five per cent of global oil demand. Every day on which a worker does not make the home-to-office journey is a day on which that share does not burn fuel. Multiplied across the millions of Italian workers who could work remotely and do not — not because they are unwilling, not because their duties do not permit it, but because they have no right to do so — the saving is real, measurable, immediate. At zero cost to the State.

It requires no infrastructural investment. It requires no new technology. It requires no subsidies, no tax incentives, no public tenders, no years of phased implementation. It requires one thing alone: that remote work cease to be a revocable individual dispensation and become an enforceable structural right.

Law 81 of 2017 still governs it as a bilateral agreement between the parties: without general obligations, without enforceable minimum standards, without structural protection of any kind. Those who work remotely do so because their employer permits it. Not because they have the right. This asymmetry is the condition that makes everything else possible: the employer who revokes remote working at will, the manager who summons everyone to the office five days a week, the system that reverts to the form it already knows as soon as the pressure eases. Without a right, every gain is provisional. Without a rule, every emergency starts from zero.

Concretely, transforming that dispensation into a right would mean at least three things. First: recognising the right to remote work for all compatible roles, with a minimum number of days guaranteed by law and not unilaterally negotiable by the employer. Second: shifting the burden of proof — it is not the worker who must justify a request to work remotely, it is the employer who must justify a refusal with objective and verifiable reasons. Third: providing that during certified energy emergencies — when the IEA or the European Commission issue emergency recommendations — the minimum number of remote days be automatically increased, without the need for company-by-company, union-by-union, corridor-by-corridor negotiations.

This is not a revolutionary proposal. It is what other countries have already done, in different forms. Portugal introduced in 2021 the right of parents to work remotely without the need for an individual agreement. Belgium recognised in 2022 the right of private-sector employees to request remote work and imposed on employers the obligation to justify a refusal. Ireland introduced in the same year the Right to Request Remote Work, with defined procedures and mandatory response timelines. None of these countries has resolved the problem definitively — let us be honest about that. But all of them have shifted the axis: from the employer’s favour to the worker’s right. From the exception to the norm.

It is what European recommendations explicitly call for. It is what distinguishes a policy from an intention: the rule that produces effects independently of the goodwill of the individual employer, of the political season, of the mood of the manager in question. The rule that does not disappear when oil prices fall fourteen per cent in a single trading session, and that does not depend on the durability of a truce negotiated on Truth Social.

The resistance to all of this is not irrational from the perspective of those who exercise it. It is perfectly coherent with a logic: that of capital, which needs to see in order to control, and that of the psyche, which needs to see in order to exist. These two logics — which Part I of this essay sought to analyse in their deeper layers, Marxian and Jungian — are not dismantled by emergencies. Emergencies suspend them, place them in parentheses, render them temporarily untenable. But parentheses close. And when they close, the logic resumes exactly from where it left off.

They are dismantled by laws. By rights. By the transformation of what every crisis makes obvious into what every rule makes enforceable. By the political decision — taken in peacetime, not under the pressure of an ultimatum on Truth Social, not in the urgency of a war that has already found its provisional ceasefire — to recognise that remote work is not an emergency response to be activated when Hormuz closes and archived when it reopens. It is an instrument of energy policy. It is an instrument of labour policy. It is a choice about collective priorities: deciding that the interests of those who work, commute and pay for fuel matter as much — if not more — than the employer’s need to see the seats occupied at nine in the morning.

The next crisis will come. This is not a catastrophist prediction: it is a reading of recent history. And perhaps it is not even the next one: Hormuz was reopened and closed again within hours, while these lines were being written. Italy’s dependence on that strait has not changed. Fifty-seven per cent of imported diesel remains there, structurally vulnerable. Prices will remain elevated for years. And every time the next crisis comes, the debate will start again from scratch. Three days as revolution. Two days as reality. Zero as the norm. Unless someone, in peacetime, decides to transform that sequence into something different.

The proverb says that the master’s eye fattens the horse. It was written when the horse was the only available engine, when physical presence was the only conceivable form of work, when no one imagined that a worker could produce value from a place the master could not see. That world no longer exists. The alternatives are there, they are proven, they are economically advantageous, they are energetically necessary. They are there, available, at zero cost. And have been for years.

The stellone does not refuel the pumps.