Clowning glory of Italian politics
THERE is an old saying that in most countries the political situation is serious, but not desperate; whereas in Italy it's desperate, but not serious. Now that a comedian, Beppe Grillo, has won more votes than any other politician, the saying is more apt than ever. The country is in crisis and a joker is the only person who can stop it becoming a laughing stock. Italy has always been, politically, a bit of a basket case. The country has been the cradle of more political innovations than any other: from the Signoria (with the Medici and Visconti) to Futurism ( Marinetti), Fascism (Mussolini), Euro-Communism (Togliatti) and media mogulism (Berlusconi). Italians have always been, for better or worse, political innovators.
In a way, it's no surprise that the country has now invented Bloggerism, giving more than 25 per cent of its votes to a blogging satirist. The extraordinary innovation of last week's election was that it turned political logic on its head.
In a country where Silvio Berlusconi has a massive media arsenal at his disposal, it's always been assumed that to win an election you need to go on television as much as he does. But Grillo refused to do so, preferring instead to tour the peninsula in a camper van, swim the Straits of Messina, and use the internet as an electronic balcony. If people are now talking about the "Italian Spring", it's because Citizen Kane appears to have been usurped by a witty nerd who looks like Snow White's chipper friend. The result would have been inconceivable without the Italian economy being stagnant for a decade. By next year, the country's economy will have contracted by a tenth from its peak. Youth unemployment is at a staggering 37 per cent.
For two decades foreigners have been wondering what on earth they saw in Berlusconi. The answer is that they like a charismatic, red-blooded kind of guy. Against a backdrop of verbose, patrician MPs, Berlusconi seemed like a man of the people. Though politically his opposite, Grillo has the same appeal: he gets angry, he swears, he jokes. The way he harangues the piazza, and whips the crowd up into a kind of enraged hysteria, is not so different to one of his less savoury predecessors. In many ways, though, he is the inheritor of a strange political movement which began in 1944 called Qualunquismo: it aimed to do away completely with political parties by appealing to the ordinary man, the uomo qualunque. Given the ubiquity of organised crime and corruption, there appears, in every generation, a ground-level qualunquismo that promises to sweep away the political "crooks". Grillo has relentlessly campaigned for a "clean parliament", purged of those with criminal records. The irony is that, having a manslaughter conviction for killing three passengers in a car in 1981, Grillo has said that he himself won't take up a seat in parliament. Usually, what happens to the qualunquismo movements is that the new broom gets stuck in the marmellatona - the "massive jam" - of Italian politics, and the broom gets dirty rather than parliament clean. It's hard to remember, but Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi, the disgraced former leader of the Northern League, were supposed to do away with the "thieves" in Rome.