The authoritarianism of Italian governance is not attracting as much comment as it might if current goings-on were going on in, say, England. Starting from the top, the President is out of his constitutional cage and rampaging across the democratic terrain wiping out the independence of Judiciary from Executive, refusing reasonable progress in the forming of an administration conforming to the parameters of the last general election, enabling to the bitter end the continuance of the administration he installed (Monti has now been kept in office - control might be a more accurate choice of word - for 16 months) and asserting for himself complete powers to 'resolve' the problem of our 'ungovernability'. Behind the facade of technical or caretaker government there is presidential government ruling by decree and freed now from even the minimal restraint imposed by parliamentary vote.
Moving down, we have the caretaker government itself. Monti is in Brussels at the moment, reporting in on the control of any livelier responses to internal deflation, and the centralised coverage of lapses in systemically important bank/political administration practices.
The disciplining of regional and local level population, business and contracts is suffering too from the advance of 'irresponsible' voting at local level which has been generated by too much troughing by local administrations, their associated institutions, and their personnel. Attention is to be directed to this problem once our hash has been settled at the centre. However the steady attrition resulting from investigation, charge and arrest of local bankers, institutional administrators various, revelations of hospitals, universities, etc., with big black holes in their institutional fabric - and in the case of schools, roads, entire towns and even cities, their physical fabric too - has been noted as both disruptive of smooth rule and encouraging of our uppity tendencies. There are to be fewer occasions of voting (sinful, voting is) once the response to the outcome of the general election - and here it is arguable that the general election in question is that of 2008 and its presidential subversion - has been settled into place permanently; then the reform of local governance can be decreed once more (the previous decrees fell with the arrival of the national quinquennial requirement to let us out of our boxes).
The media generally are under control, distracted by individual stories of iniquity and exploitation of the public purse, and in any case mostly committed to the bog standard systems of political control currently being finalised at European level. In Italy of course they have especially the mythology of fascism (as well as its realities) to attack in all its 20th century wickedness, leaving its 21st century form, shape-shifting and viciously efficient, free run at our lives, culture and, inter alia, our standard of living and our security (both of which last might reasonably be agreed to be part of the state's remit but not the first two).
Pan-European attempts to portray the Five Stars as clowns, innocents, ignoramuses, have given way to defamation and demonisation. We can expect the first criminalisations shortly, extending beyond the media and into the institutions of our dying democracy. Angels doubt we'll be allowed near a ballot box again any time soon, whatever particular form taken by the 'crisis' justifications being put forward by the Euro-regime (the war on terror now being rather old hat and never awfully popular in Europe).
The next group of decent people who are going to get a ballot paper in their hands are the Germans. The German media are already describing Grillo as the most dangerous man in Europe, as a Fascist, as a populist (what is the matter with populism? [ that is for another post, keep to the point. ed.]) Grillo remarked that the Movement is the French revolution without the guillotine. Angels fear the guillotine is here: that the elites will try to use it - in the end; the independence of the magistrates is already compromised.
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I was enjoying a welcone caffe alto the other day, out of the blasted rain, and leafing through La Nazione.
It came to me that more pages were devoted to the Conclave than to the attempts to form a government/
A few posts ago I remarked that Giorgio Napolitano would have his instructions from Berlin, Brussels and the Bankers, and doubtless he he is trying to carry them out.
Now that habemus Papam, perhaps some of the Press will start doing their job. Perhaps.
I watched the news this evening and, as a neophyte observer of Italian politics, was shocked both by the failure even now after all these wasted weeks to elect speakers for the two houses of parliament and, even more, by the conduct of comrade Bersani.
Called upon to vote he entered the polling booth with a furious gesture and emerged at once flinging the ballot in the general direction of the urn used to collect them. No greater gesture of contempt for democratic process could have been choreographed.
It is bad enough that the entire 'Democratic' party returned blank ballot papers in every ballot; but far worse was that furious gesture of rejection of democracy. In later news they used a picture of another of the five fruitless ballots rendered so by the behaviour of the Democrats - but too late. That man is a disgrace to his faction, his Party and to the Italian Left.
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