Towards the vote of April 2006
The election campaign has entered the live and the choice between centre-left and center-right is approaching. The April elections, however, risk being turned into a referendum: for or against Silvio Berlusconi?
All this is the result of the personification of politics, a method that has nothing to do with the western democracies and which characterizes, instead, the South American dictatorships or the Belarus-type regimes, a country that lives in the shadow of the community of independent States (former Soviet Union except the three Baltic
republics). It is the result of an electoral campaign conducted without rules, where lies and insinuations triumph and where there are more theatre blows, sudden apparitions, last-hour contingencies rather than government programs, intentions and ideas of Contenders. O
n March 8, 2006, an editorial by Paolo Mieli deployed the Corriere della Sera from the centre-left, justing this choice with the fact that "the government gave the impression that it was more dedicated to solving its internal disputes and having Minded more to the personal fortunes of the President of the Council than to those of the country. " Such a clear and transparent stance has been seen as subversive, when in the Anglo-Saxon democracies it is normal for the newspapers to declare their orientation before the vote
. These events have made a quiet and thoughtful observer like Pier Luigi Battista say that "the intoxicated atmosphere that is breathed a few days after the vote shows how still tenacious in Italy the apocalyptic distortion of political strug
gle". While Diliberto accuses his opponents of having his hands "dripping with blood", Berlusconi proclaims the state of "democratic emergency." We are witnessing a bad show, and I am convinced that millions of Italians are now tired of these methods and this climate from confrontation. Is i
t possible that the politicians who are called to govern the country continue to give satisfaction to a minority of trouphorosis, extremists, fanatics and businessmen and do not worry, instead, of a majority that is silent, but not for this indifferent?
