There is a shadow over the election campaign. Or, at least, so some newspapers write. The shadow is that of a judicial grain ready to explode to prevent the center-right from winning elections that may have already been won. What it is, however, is not explained by anyone. It is alluded to. We limit ourselves to suggestions without offering details, as if they were prophecies rather than news.
The director of Libero Alessandro Sallusti, for example, on 4 August reported on certain unspecified environments – “slums in which the smell is unbearable but there is real life and nothing escapes” – in which it would be certain “that a couple of judicial barrels are being prepared, an outbreak expected at the end of August, of the tough ones, someone even ventures the names of prominent political figures in the center-right area ”. And he wrote about “ready-made dossiers removed from the drawers and placed on the table ready for signature”. A few days later Ignazio La Russa, a leading figure of the Brothers of Italy (FdI), to a question posed by the newspaper La Verità about a “judicial bomb” ready to explode from now on to the vote, replied that “unfortunately we cannot exclude this eventuality looking at the electoral campaigns of the past, and the storms unleashed against Berlusconi and Salvini ”.
And, speaking of Salvini, the story told on July 28 by the press is also alarming. According to the Turin daily, some documents reveal “new elements on the relationship between Matteo Salvini and Russia, which also shed a disturbing light on the fall of Mario Draghi, and the events that occurred in the last two months of the government’s life”. The public debate rightly focused on the relationship between Salvini and the Russian authorities for days, with very harsh tones and legitimate requests for clarification. However, there is also another aspect that deserves to be considered.
We are only at the beginning of a campaign that is already one of the most opaque in republican history
In fact, those news come from unsubstantiated “intelligence documents”. At the time of publication, it was not clear what kind of activity the internal intelligence source who handled the information was engaged. It was not clear what structure it was. Nor was their nationality clear. Franco Gabrielli, undersecretary with responsibility for services, denied that that activity was attributable to the Italian secret services. The day after the news came out, the director of the Press Massimo Giannini provided some more details, writing about “informal documents summarizing the intelligence work”. It’s not much.
This type of information, say, would not be usable even in court. In fact, it would be different if those news had emerged during an investigation by the judiciary, which for better or for worse is assisted by guarantees for the suspects. Then, the media fortunately follow other logics, and when you get hold of a piece of news it must always be published. It is striking, however, that no one was also alarmed by the fact that in the middle of the election campaign news contained in “informal summary documents” came to the newspapers from a source as intrinsically opaque as intelligence, and which, moreover, concern one of the main candidates in the elections. On the other hand, there are not even those who have been alarmed by the fact that, as far as we know, security services of uncertain nationality, perhaps foreigners, would keep an eye on the activities and movements of Italian political leaders.
The risk of an election campaign studded with such incidents should be evident. Also because we are only at the beginning of a campaign that is already one of the most opaque and poisoned that republican history remembers. On every front: left and right, politics and information. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to trace the boundary between politics and information.
The air has become so heavy that Guido Crosetto, one of the founders of FdI and today an entrepreneur much listened to by Giorgia Meloni, proposed “a pact with the adversaries” for the good of the country, since in the autumn “we will experience moments of frightening difficulty “, Even with the risk of civil war social conflicts” not only figuratively, given how much anger grows “. And it is not clear whether it is an attempt to soften the tone or whether it is yet another prophecy.
On the other hand, the electoral campaign had begun with Salvini returning to challenge the issue of migrants like a club to recover the detachment from Meloni and snatch the leadership of the right from her, while Silvio Berlusconi from the parliamentarians who abandoned Forza Italia after the fall of government wished: “May they rest in peace”. There were even those who targeted Renato Brunetta for his physical appearance. And then it got even worse. Personal attacks and insults multiplied. The controversies have always been against someone and never to propose an idea. Even the dead of the Marcinelle disaster, the accident that took place in a Belgian coal mine in 1956 which cost the lives of 262 miners, of whom 136 were Italian emigrants, have been reduced to a topic of electoral controversy.
Enrico Letta had announced in a letter to Corriere della Sera that he wanted to go to Marcinelle “to honor those 262 victims and also, symbolically, all the others who died in other bowels, starting with those of the Mediterranean”. And Giorgia Meloni is ready to reply that that incident took place in a “radically different situation from that of the current situation of immigration to Italy”, to which “huge flows of irregular immigrants that left-wing governments (or to which the left participated) they never knew or wanted to stem “.
The end of ideas
We could go on and on with the examples. But what good would it do? After all, these are the tones and manners of the second republic, and no one is surprised anymore. In the past, too, the campaigns were tough. It would be enough to remember that from the postwar period up to the 1980s the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party clashed, two parties organized ideologically to represent radically divergent political and geopolitical horizons. But they were also popular and interclass forces, and for this reason they were both expansive and inclusive in nature. The clash was of a purely political nature and served to determine the fate of a community, not just that of an individual or group gathered around an interest. Then, the world changed.
In Italy it happened in the dramatic years of the massacre assault of the Cosa Nostra and of the Milanese investigations of Clean Hands. It was the early nineties of the twentieth century. Popular parties were wiped out, some by judicial inquiries, others by history. They were replaced by lean organizations, similar to electoral committees. Ideas were replaced by the cult of the leader. A bipolar muscular system was established, and in this context the new political formations began to rebuild their identity especially against their opponents, not having much more to say. In a short time the tone of the communication also changed, which became faster and brighter because it no longer served to represent a cultural horizon but to indicate the enemy. And then the information also changed.
Like those of politics, the tones of generalist information over the years have become increasingly harsh
With the party newspapers gone, a mixed system has emerged capable of representing political and corporate interests together, on the right as well as on the left. Also on a bipolar basis. Thus began to shorten the distance between information and power. In the judicial news, old-fashioned inquiries have become increasingly rare, replaced by power of attorney papers and indiscretions. In the political pages, the news has been supplanted by a new genre, the backstage, which gives the reader the illusory sensation of reading something that is beyond the control of power.
In general, like those of politics, the tones of generalist information over the years have become increasingly harsh. “The left sucks”, for example, is the title that opens the first page of Libero on 5 August. And three days later: “Calenda Pagliaccio. Comics on the left ”. And it is the same director of the press Massimo Giannini who defines the article on the relationship between Salvini and the Russian authorities as a “background” and not an investigation.
If these, briefly, are the characteristics of the electoral campaigns of the second republic, well we find them all in the spectacle offered in recent weeks by politics, and especially by the center-left, starting from the need to proclaim the usual democratic emergency, identifying an enemy that in this case he is no longer represented by Silvio Berlusconi or Matteo Salvini, but by Giorgia Meloni.
That Meloni is on the right has always been known, and of a right that often manifests itself as radical and alarming. Her words are still in the air at a recent rally of the Spanish right of Vox, for which she later had to partially apologize. However, since the Brothers of Italy takes the votes precisely for that reason, obsessively repeating that he is a fascist does not help much, if not to prepare the usual request for a useful vote of the last days. And in the meantime to try to keep together a coalition so heterogeneous that it imploded by itself after a few days of electoral campaign, partly for lack of a clear political line, partly for the tactics and radical individualism of many of its leaders , including Carlo Calenda.
Calenda, however, after breaking the agreement with Enrico Letta, went to Tg5 to explain that “the Democratic Party first made a pact with us and then made a pact, with contrary content, with those who voted 55 times against trust in Draghi, with those who say no to everything, with the waste-to-energy plant, with those who are basically a communist, because then, at the end of the fair, that’s it ”.
Poor Calenda, it was almost tenderness in his having brought himself back to such an unnoticed normality as a little Berlusconi. However no, at the end of the fair there are no more Communists. At the end of the fair there seems to be nothing left, no idea, only insults and shouts. Considering its protagonists and the spectacle they are offering, this election campaign is in short the apotheosis of the second republic, and at the same time the representation of its radical failure.