More political thoughts in more random order... don't really know where to start..
Yesterday and the day before were election days. 13 regions out of 20 were electing their president. Administrative elections they are called. That's it. And they are usually considered less important, but quite obviously, since everybody was voting media put a lot of emphasis on this. Fair enough.
Now, from my modest point of view, in administrative elections you have to choose between two fairly local candidates. Someone your dad has been to dinner with vs someone you have seen taking coffee with the major of your town who's a friend of your mum. And since they are gonna run the little practical affairs of you region for five years, I'd say you choose the one you think will do a better job. Regardless of what political party they are supported by.. this would be my attitude.
But no. In this electoral campaign everything and anything happened, except hearing from the actual candidates. Brief re-cap. All the major parties campaigned from Rome, with their own tones and slogans, even if the local candidates were not always in line with the whole thing. Berlusconi did his typical and overheard show of the victim and the great leader together over and over again. In Lazio and Milan the chap who had to submit the name of the candidate for Berlusconi's party to the judges, got bored of waiting for his turn, went to drink a coffee and was too late for submission. But you can't have elections without the governing party can you? No worries, no problem. In both cases they turned to the judges asking for mercy, at the end they were late for only five minutes or something trivial like that. Which is fair enough. But while the judges were pondering their decision, Berlusconi formulated and got approved in parliament a decree that basically said "if the judges don't want to readmit my candidates they are going to do it anyway because of this decree." Great. Some people protested, saying it was disgusting. If anything it was pointless, the candidate for Milan got readmitted anyway, the candidate for a province of Lazio didn't anyway.
In the meanwhile, Berlusconi decided that it was highly unfair that on the state TV people could be able to make talk shows with slightly leftist conducers and guests. At least under elections, every program should have had an equal number of people from the two parties. So he shut down every political talk show on the state TV channels.
Oh and in a gathering he promise to cure cancer in 3 years. which was quite grotesquelly funny.
And all this trouble for just administrative elections.. worth it?
Yeah worth it. Cose, come the day of the elections Italians vote right. And massively so. The whole Berlusconian campaign "vote with me or against me!" worked. People didn't vote the candidate, they voted to show their love or hate for the man. Northern Italy voted Lega Nord. Which is.. ehm.. imagine BNP, imagine it run by peasants, like actual peasants, then multiply the ideology of BNP by 10. That's the party we are talking about. Candidates belonging to that party run the whole of Northern Italy and they got the highest number of votes in most cases.
Other interesting points are: a lot of people voted Grillo, who is a comedian who just wants to mess about. And 37% (or sth like that) of people didn't vote.
so? so well.. the scary thing is that this is what people want. The majority of italians actually want Lega Nord and Berlusconi. They seriously think this is the best thing for the country. And so maybe it is. Let aside absolute right or wrong. If this is what people want then maybe it's the best thing for them. And if you don't agree.. well, then you should have shouted louder, or you can always emigrate. Because I fear a quite dark future for this country...
John Barleycorn must die.
