skriker

These are special days for our (italian) democracy. On The 9^th of February we officially entered the 2 months elections period before the 9^th of April, the day of the truth. Why do I call it that way? The actual Government lasted longer than any in our history and as a matter of fact it was the only one able to reach the end of the mandate. And, as everybody knows, our Prime Minister was the well known Silvio Berlusconi (aka "il Nano" – The Midget). The point is: has our society's immune system built a vaccine for this well known criminal? I'm not going to talk about what he has done (or should I say what he has NOT done?) in these last 5 years (in this post) for now, but I'll try to concentrate on his campaign, and his efforts to get elected again.

We have a special law for this 2 months period (from the day when the Parliament and the Senate are closed to the day of the elections) called Par Condicio. This law grants that both the coalitions (we have a sort of bipolar system) and their candidates get the same amount of time on televisions and radios following a principle of fairness. In the last month Silvio Berlusconi tried to delete this law as he pointed out that such an illiberal law is not democratic but, as his allied parties did not agree with him, he realized that the only way to fill the gap between his coalition and the opponents [at that time the opponent coalition was about 6 points ahead in all the polls] was to “invade” Italy's medias. So, for about two weeks, before the “par condicio” law would be applied, we had to see his face in all kinds of TV shows (he was guest even in shows in which the format did not include guests).

He justified to the worried citizens and opponents that he had not appeared on television over the last few years because he was too busy working on his prime minister's duties implicitly stating that it was his right to recover the time had not spent before.

But what did he have to say during all these silly appearances to justify such widespread presence? An American propaganda expert described his technique with this sentence: “every morning throw shit on your opponent and paint the whole Italy of red”. Our opponent coalition's leader is Romano Prodi, well known in Europe for his chief role in the European Union Commission [he was followed by the Spanish Aznar]. The last three months were pretty critical because of a big discussion about whether the left wing coalition had or not helped the escalation of bank [BNL] by a famous Cooperative [UNIPOL] (more info The Economist, la Repubblica).

What Berlusconi stated was that these Cooperatives are an example, as the Magistrature, of how Prodi's coalition is immoral and how communists are still spread in all Italy's institutions. The opponent coalition's behaviour was then officially proved to be uninvolved in this escalation, but people still use this example as a possible reason why not to vote for Prodi.

But what did Berlusconi answer when he was asked to report about his own problems?
He dribbled all the specific topics stating for example: “Only Napoleon did more and better than me.” He also compared himself to Churchill in the war against communists and underlined the way everybody attacks him in Italy and the way he's able to ignore it for the State's good, just like Jesus Christ. He keeps on repeating that he's the only reason of the new good diplomatic relationship between his friends G.W.Bush and V.Putin.

And we are just at the beginning.