Category Archives: electoral crisis

Osama, Mladic, Berlusconi: rough winds do shake

Riffing on the Northern League's fear of a "zingaropoli" or "Gypsyville," this mock poster advises those who don't want a Kebabville to vote on June 1-2. Polls closed May 30.

May ended up being a very bad month for the intolerant: first Osama bin Laden, then Ratko Mladic, and now Silvio Berlusconi, whose coalition was dealt a serious blow in run-off mayoral elections all over Italy this past week. Of course, Berlusconi’s crimes of philandering and corruption are much less grave than terrorism and mass murder, but the effect he’s had on democracy in a country struggling with economic stagnation has not been healthy for western values.

The net effect of these three incredible events has been to clog Premesso’s news-gathering apparatus with an overload, so apologies for the lack of updates.

The campaign in Milan reached histrionic levels of fear and xenophobia, most of it coming directly from the premiere’s own party. The tactic backfired, and John Hooper, writing in the Guardian, quoted Professor James Walston of the American University of Rome, who made an excellent point mirroring my own in the case of Magdi Allam a few weeks ago:

Watson said he feared Berlusconi’s tactics could have a lasting impact on interracial and interfaith relations in Italy. “This type of language has been used by the prime minister, not some neo-fascist maniac on the fringes,” he said. “It will be difficult to bring Italian political language back to acceptable European levels.”

Seeing this tactic lose out was refreshing, and often funny to boot. (Read more of Walston’s excellent analysis, included a piece from which the above quote was taken, on his blog, or watch at interview with him shortly before the eight minute-mark here.)  Young Italians may not be taking to the piazze the way their Spanish compatriots are, but they are taking to web and producing hilarious results. Web-savvy Milanesi hilariously parodied the brutish xenophobia online; check out pages on Facebook encouraging people to vote for the mayor today (June 2), a national holiday celebrating the birth of the first republic, or supporting a fictional Muslim district of Milan called Sucate.

To come: photos from the streets.

150 Years of Unity?

And the rockets' red glare?

Italy’s political situation, overshadowed lately by events in Middle East, is grim.  Berlusconi’s coalition totters.  Fini’s breakaway group seems waiting for the right moment.  Indeed this fall March was bandied about as the right time for a vote.  More power has flowed to Lega Nord’s Bossi, whose ministers voted again making the 17th a holiday, and Berlusconi even showed up tot he vote with a handkerchief in green — breakaway Lega’s color.

As the case was in WW2 and the anni di piombo, the north is again the battleground for Italy’s future.  Lega parliamentarians are in the middle of passing aggressive decentralization reforms that could be completed as early as May.  If so, Berlusconi will lose ground as Bossi’s secessionists take Italy back to a past of campanilismo and freedom from taxation.

With typical Italian flair for a big show, Turin is prepped for an unlikely show of Italian nationalism.  Italian’s lukewarm sentiments towards their nation are legendary.  The political crisis going on for the better part of a year highlights this, especially when a member of the ruling coalitions regularly insists that unification is not worth celebrating.  It leads one to ask, what’s all the fuss about?

Friday AM briefs

Unctuous?

There’s way too much news this week, from the Libya to the milleproroghe, from Macedonia’s electoral crisis to the role of social media in the events that have shaken the Arab world.   Fini’s proclamation that the PM was not ‘anointed by the lord’ may hint at the beginning of the end on this side of the Mediterranean as well.

Look for a more thorough weekend update as your chronicler has other deadlines to meet this mild Friday morning.

For those who’ve spent time east of Apennines, ponder this bit from the Economist’s review of David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples.

Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines).

Friday AM Roundup

What’s great about Friday morning?  Having the Economist placed at your feet.  And even though this is a blog, sometimes it takes having the paper placed in your hands to do a good scan.

Tying together all the threads

Premesso’s not-quite week in review, drawn from the weekly of record:

1. On February 15, La Padania interviewed Pier Luigi Bersani, PD secretary.  (Shown elsewhere on this blog with his sleeves rolled up.)

Salient quote: Va anche bene che il governo rimanga nell’ambito del centrodestra. “It’s also all right if the government stays center-right.”

Is el Senatur sharpening the knife?

English language coverage.

2. As the holes in the immigration walls get harder to plug, shifting from Ceuta and Melilla to Lampedusa to the Greece-Turkey land border, Greece talks of suspending the Dublin Convention for asylum seekers.  The Economist’s Charlemagne comes out with the following sound idea: “A painful compromise might be tried: if Greece wants to suspend Dublin II, it should accept a temporary suspension of Schengen and the return of border controls.”  Me likey.

3. The Oscars: “this year’s awards are less relevant than ever.”  More need not be said, except that Hollywood need to keep looking to that export market.

4.  In Lexington, Obama’s handling of Egypt gets a look.  Much howling and gnashing of teeth from John Bolton, Niall Ferguson and Michael Scheuer, among others.  But maybe No-Drama Obama was the Decider?

Obama is said to have been more certain in private that Mr Mubarak’s jig was up than America’s public pronouncements (especially those of Hillary Clinton, his sometimes behind-message secretary of state) let on. He flatly rejected the Israelis’ analysis that the Egyptian president could hang on and that America should do everything to help him. Mr Obama’s conversation with Mr Mubarak on the evening of February 1st is said to have been the toughest between an American president and an ally since Ronald Reagan’s scolding of Menachem Begin during Israel’s bombing of Beirut in August 1982.

5. In Schumpter, the uneasy art-business axis is examined.  Damien Hirst is one shrewd businessman.

Damien Hirst was even more audacious. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from £70.5m ($126.5m) on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

And following in his footsteps in Venice, perhaps the Zero Group?  Stay tuned.

Minetti on CNN

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE9Da8Pw4Rk]

Minetti’s English is not the issue.

Someone claimed she was near-native, which is obviously not true, but she speaks English much better than many a company head, tourist operator, receptionist at one of the few blue-chip firms, or other people who are expected to deal with the non-Italian public. Of interest is the lack of understanding that accepting money or having sex with a senior political figure might engender even a whiff of impropriety.

Broadening the categories of ‘care’ and ‘help’ and reducing the idea that accepting a politican’s money could be for ‘one thing [sex] or the other [altruism]’ helps to do away with the whole category of ‘truth’ or even ‘reality.’ I could be sitting here typing this, or, per Decartes, I could be a brain somewhere on the matrix, kept charged up as a human battery.

But these are tested methods of obfuscation that any adolescent is familiar with, and thus less interesting. What is interesting, and perhaps harder to explain, are to what degree the twin notions of bella figura and buonismo inform these four minutes and twenty second of spin. For the unitiated, bella figura is a concept that pervades and informs every aspect of Italian life. (Coming from Washington, arguable one of the world’s worst-dressed cities, this can be quite refreshing.)  Literally “beautiful figure” refers to the importance of appearance in all things — often to the total exclusion of everything else.

There are many examples of it in literature through the ages, but to keep it grounded in something that our gnat-like attention spans can comprehend in 2011: “You are really an Italian. All fire and smoke and nothing inside.” That’s Rinaldi to Frederick in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms.

How does this relate to Minetti? Check out her smile, even when being pressed by the interviewer on very unpleasant questions that imply that she might’ve taken money for sex. It doesn’t waver. This is fundamentally different from the stiff upper lip that we Americans have inherited from our Britsh forebears, and it’s also different than the sunny “how are you?” at the grocery that has frustrated generations of visitors to our shores. As Rinaldi implies, the bella figura is not fake, but merely superficial.

Buonismo is harder to translate but more salient to understanding what goes on in this interview. Literally “good-ism”, you could term it “good-sportism.” Minetti is forced to put her bella figura on display here because the interviewer is most certainly not displaying buonismo.

In Italy, TV presenters and journalists are usually expected to abide by the unwritten law that no interview should actually leave the interviewee worse off in terms of social capital after its conclusion that before.  Otherwise, what is the point of agreeing to one?  Of course, if a journalism won’t comply simply out of buonismo, then the fact that the PM owns or controls all the major stations can certainly affect their bontà or goodness, but that’s another lesson.

Note Minetti’s obvious discomfort at being pressed on a couple of lines of questioning. Perhaps she is not used to the very direct manner of the Englishman, or perhaps she dislikes a certain judgmental tone in his voice.

But they are the only points in which her implacable facade cracks ever so slightly. At 3.31: “How much money did he give you?” the interviewer asks in a surprising show of unfriendliness — let’s call it malismo. Her eyes widen; she looks off to the right as if physically struck, and squints when she answers evasively. “That’s a detail which I wouldn’t go into… it doesn’t matter. That’s not the matter.”

Having dismissed this uptight Englishmen, she recovers her smile. Again at 4.12, in another show of malismo, he is asking her about the character of her relationship: “Not an improper realtionship, a sexual relationship?” The language is important here — in the mind of Minetti, what’s improper about sex with the most powerful man in her country? Everything she has grown up with — much of which has been made by this man — tells her that it is not only proper, but virtuous.

So again, a physical recoil — we are in the land of drama and gesutre here, so not totally unsurprising — and a stammer. “I wouldn’t go in those details – those are private details — private details.” She looks off awkwarrdly, and the clip ends.

Meanwhile, the language police have superimposed over her face in these telling moments a handy list of exactly how many errors she has made in speaking: four very minor ones in three minutes (one of which I would actually dispute — I heard ‘music room,’ not ‘group’ at 2.09) Outside of the comment section, there is no other analysis.

Castigating the leader for his infelicities only opens the opposition — which by now should number far more than the traditional, and traditionally impotent, coalition centered around the colorless and reviled PD — to accusations of being dour old spoilsports. Focusing on sex detracts from the very real issues — most notably low growth, high youth unemployment, educational reform, a powerful coalition partner who woud throw out one of the few groups actually contributing to growth, and the lack of youth or women in postions of power — at hand.

At this point, don’t be surprised if your more free-thinking English or American friends miss the point, and after a good howl at the fact that none other than porn star Rocco Siffredi is going on the record to admire the Cav’s stamina, stop to wonder why on earth anyone is so scandalized. It is, after all, Italy, and one thing that we Anglo-Saxons love about Italy is that it has always been much less inhibited than our comparatively stuff countries. Rocco Siffredi on TV doing a (genuinely funny) potato chip commerical or inventive Southern entreprentuers calling their pepper conconcations “Calabrese viagra” is certain not to change, and what sourpuss would will it so?

But some of the biggest social damage that 17 years of Berlusconismo has done to the country has been its continued insistence that bella figura is not being everything but the only thing. Minetti is all fire and smoke and little else. Here today — gone tomorrow, but the negative effects, now half a generation deep, will persist for as long as the whole generation ravaged by those effects remains in their late-attained adulthood.

Nitpicking over the English of a pawn like Minetti misses the point entirely. Which, given the Italian left’s own obsession with figure belle and otherwise, is entirely expected.

Berlusconi’s Steganography

Yesterday the FT ran the following photo, shot by AP photographer Riccardo de Luca, above-the-fold in its Europe edition.  The unspoken message is clear: you’re old, and it’s time to leave.

Tired

Even in a recent broadcast, Berlusconi seems old and tired — his hair obviously dyed, the wrinkles showing.  My personal distaste for him notwithstanding, I was surprised to see chinks in the Cav’s armor.  He maintains an almost fanatical control of his image in press — which is not hard when one owns or controls most of it — but some quick searches turned up some amusing old photos.  Most are not worth commenting on, unless you’re really curious about how he looked with a full head of hair, except one.

Small and powerful

Italy in the 1970s was an incredibly dangerous place where kidnappings — especially of wealthy industrialists and their families — by the Mafia were common.  This photo is a fascinating scorchio — a snapshot — into the mind of the man who would be king, and who knew as much, three decades ago.  The pistol on the desk is surely no accident, especially if, as the Daily Mail reports, he spent two hours on the photoshoot.  It’s intriguing to wonder what it means, especially given the claim that he packed heat in event of a Mafia kidnapping.

The gun is there, but it is on the table.  It is not pointed at anyone, and it is not on his person — a tacit signal in a carefully-coded language that Berlusconi is a man with whom the syndicates could truck with, rather just extract a one-time payment from by dint of force.

Pure speculation — but what is certain is that the year after this photo was taken Berlusconi would found Fininvest and join Propaganda 2.  Over the next five years, he would earn 113 billion lire, €58.4 million in today’s currency, in transactions obscured by “endless financial Chinese boxes…entirely unfathomable to outsiders” and “bizarre businesses…set up under prestanomi (nicknamed accounts with dummy holders),” in the words of Tobias Jones.  Around the same time, he hired Vittorio Manago from Sicily to work as a groundsman at Arcore, who died a decade ago in prison doing time for a double murder and drug trafficking.

Suspicion, as the saying goes, is the antechamber of truth.

Lelemore Lelemore

If you find recent write-ups on the doings at Arcore too much to bear lately, then get your day started right with this hilarious Grease parody. Warning: not only do you have to follow the news and Italian, you have to know have Italians interpret/hear English. There’s enough code-switching in this for a linguist’s wet dream. You don’t have to know much about Grease.  Hat-tip: Zoomata.

If you want to see the original, it’s here.

Now, while we’re at it, how about a Super Breakout-style bunga-bunga game?

Now: can we get some of that Egyptian and Tunisian action on this side of the Mediterranean, please?

The Chains are Broken, the Knives are Sharpened, the Glock is Photographed

Morning roundup:

Interesting times in Tunisia.  Is it the Arab’s world Gdansk or is that too much to hope for?  We’ll see.  But it’s something.

I was heartened to see that Yglesias also excused himself from blogging extensively on Tunisia for much the same reason that I did: ignorance.  But he goes a bit further and discusses the incentive for high growth in the country,including a quote from Tyler Cowen as well.

On this side of the Mediterranean, the judiciary is coming out against Berlusconi with knives sharpened, talking about trying him as a sex offender.  I agree with Rodotà writing in the Observer back in November that it’s really tiresome how the man seems to dominate the headlines.  There’s just no escape, even when actual revolutions are happening in the next country over.  Annalis Piras, in London for L’Espresso, astutely points out that attempts to defeat Berlusconi legally just make him stronger during elections — which probably will get called early this year.  How to get out of this Chinese finger trap?

Up in Austria, Mr. Glock’s past tribulations seem like the sort of violent betrayal worthy of a Bernhard novel.  Across the waters in the US, our gun-obsessed culture futiley tries to understand madness, criminality and legislation by zooming in on the weapon itself.   I’m not sure why we have this misprision.  There are many reasons but the most overarching could have to do with David Reisman’s assertion that Americans tend to locate things outside themselves, which Margaret Mead also noticed.  While I dig around JSTOR for the original, here’s Todd Gitlin in his introduction to the 2001 edition of the Lonely Crowd:

Mead herself pointed to a passage noting that other-directed conformism predisposed Americans to project power centers outside the self — a reason the paranoid streak in American life loomed so large, and perhaps also a reason Americans were excessively afraid that the Russians would take them over.

What if we just substitute “immigrants” or “socialists” for Russians?  Does that make it clearer, and take some of the blame away from a pugnacious octogenarian Austrian engineer?  I’d hope so.  The Times piece shamefully ignores much of what is true about human society and economics of supply and demand.  Chekhov’s rule may be true in fiction but less so in real life: just because the gun is there, it doesn’t have to be fired.

More Zungu Zungu, less Bunga Bunga

This site isn’t meant to break news. But there’s been a near-perfect storm of events — so much excellent newsworthy material on Italy, the Balkans and international relations in general, and not nearly enough time to bang out a coherent thought with me being swamped with both typical and atypical end-of-year responsibilities. Some points: Berlusconi’s survival may well lead Italy into a speculative attack on the order of 1976’s run on the lira, the WSJ has a better handle on Lega Nord than the NYT, Thaci might actually be extremely bad for Kosovo, and Wikileaks will change a lot of things. More germane to my task, blogs like Aaron Bady’s show how good analysis can get one noticed.

With an eye towards the skies, I leave you with this video from the brilliant Taiwanese animators NMA. Merry merry. (Although with what’s going on in London and Paris, it seems that the weather is far greater cause for concern than security.)