I’ve always said that bipolarism is dangerous and the absolute majority anti-democratic. We irritate them. We’ve created a short-circuit
A.Mussolini, 15.03.2005
The Mussolini in question, is not il Duce, but rather la nipote, or grand-daughter, Alessandra Mussolini, speaking in Rome today, where she has started a hunger-strike. The reason? Her new party has been barred from standing in the upcoming regional elections in Lazio, due to alleged irregularities in their paperwork*.
La Mussolini, swept along by democratic excitement and a dash of self-righteousness, has invoked the recent example of the Ukraine, where Viktor Yushchenko managed, through popular support, to overturn apparently vote rigged elections. The huge media circus surrounding La Mussolini’s hunger strike is a far cry from millions on the street, but her protest is liable to throw the whole regional election process into chaos.
La Mussolini, or La Pasionaria as she’s being dubbed with no-little amount of irony, has approached the Radical Party, for advice on this her first hunger-strike. Marco Pannella, that party’s leader, is a serial hunger-striker, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Their advice – drink a couple of cappuccini loaded with sugar!
The reaction of her erstwhile colleagues on the right says as much about them, as about the media tactics of Mussolini. Ministers Gasparri and Alemanno, both of her ex-party Alleanza Nazionale, remarked that La Mussolini on TV had appeared “nervous and overweight. So, the hunger strike could be healthy for her”[2]. Francesco Storace, also of Alleanza Nazionale, currently Governor of the Lazio region, and the man who stands to benefit the most if Mussolini’s party is excluded, said “If she does the hunger strike the way that the false signatures were collected, then there’s the risk that she’ll put on weight”[3].
From the wings (or stage-left, to push the metaphor), one of her least likely supporters, one would think, Massimo D’Alema, leader of Democrati di Sinistra (Democrats of the left) declared “Mussolini and I don’t share the same politics, but certain methods can’t be used, and in a democracy you beat adversaries with votes”[3]. High minded and moral, as ever. A mere coincidence that Mussolini’s party threatens the vote of his right wing opponents, not his own share of the electorate.
This Monkey is often confused and confounded by Mussolini. Proud of her fascist grandfather, and the things he stood for, and yet at the same time a staunch defender of women’s rights in a Parliament where the majority of deputies are men (and men of the calibre of Silvio Berlusconi, who famously said to US businessmen that they should invest in Italy because its secretaries are beautiful).
There’s a comic element to her hunger-strike. No-one believes that Mussolini will starve herself to death. She’s making a point. An important one at that. That her party, small though it is, has a right to stand for election (providing that it has collected a significant number of signatures, which she claims they have).
There are plenty on the left and right, in Italy, who would like to see the disappearance of fringe parties like Mussolini’s. They dilute the vote of their respective ideological bloc, lessening the chances for a united victory.
Large parties, who have the possibility of gaining an overall victory, are obsessed, understandably, with not losing votes. Positions on difficult issues are fudged and re-shaped to avoid giving offense (what choices have electorates in the UK got in relation to Iraq, for example?). To win, we are told, you have to hold the centre, and to hold the centre is to avoid proposing policies that differ from your opponents – after all, they’re hoping to win the centre too. Smaller parties are guided by a different mathematical impulse, that of winning votes to enable them to have a voice and a say in decision making.
Italy, for years, had fun poked at it due to its revolving governments and short lived coalitions. We’ve been led to believe that to be a serious ‘democracy’, you have to have a majority government in power. After all, America, the self-styled ‘home of democracy’ doesn’t have a multitude of parties, coalitions, or, crucially, diverse opinions in government.
It’s a world gone mad, when you have to turn to a Mussolini to give us a lesson on how a democracy should function…
* Parties wishing to stand in the elections must submit a certain number of valid signatures to the regional authority, to support their application to stand. Many of Mussolini’s Alternativa Sociale party’s signatures have been declared invalid or false. The problem is that it would seem that some of the validators were card carrying members of her rivals, Alleanza Nazionale.
[1] “L’ho sempre detto che il bipolarismo