Thursday, February 23, 2006

re-election day

Italian politics has evolved thorughout a series of boring and grey individuals, which tended to hide politics from citizens.
Maybe it's a perspective of youth, but all I remember before 1994 is a long list of ministers, coalitions, parties which didn't influence too much my life: I believe that a vast majority of young italians can't mention the progression of prime ministers up to that point.
Only two months before 1994 elections, a new party was created from scratch, and Berlusconi won its first elections. No matter of what his coalition will say, he's the one and only headmaster of the right party, everything passes through him anyway.
Berlusconi claims of having done many good things for Italy and italians. I believe he did something for me too: he pulled my attention back to politics, and as myself I believe more and more people have become interested in their country again.
Something we have learnt in these years is that politics is a complicated affair, a lot of levers to be pulled or released for this or that aim, a lot of interests to be collated together, a lot of voices to represent and many coalitions/fights/words that most of the times confuse and irritate citizens.

I am really scared now, and I mean truly scared, by how the campaign is going: many signals told that Berlusconi's government was collapsing, so the polls and statistics. But now people seemingly will not vote Prodi because he's ugly, and he's a communist, and he will eat your children. I am astonished by the violence of attacks of the right parties to him, and astonished by the marketing department of the left parties, which is saying: "errr, yes Prodi's not that beautiful, but you should see his dog", falling in these traps. Along the internet, people discuss forever about some minor-minor faults of Prodi (who's got a white soul?) and noone is smart or convincing enough to say "hey how do you like the idea of our presidente B. having survived a number of sentences through prescriptions and laws he himself created?"

Thanks presidente for making me feel an active part of Italy