Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Puckered Starfish on the Way Out

Never before, however, have we seen an entire political area vanish

Wrote Corriere della Sera

In the stunned eyes of the Rainbow people, the night was made even blacker by the triumph of Silvio Berlusconi, the impressive gains of the Northern League and the hard-to-refute claim of its secretary, Umberto Bossi: “The workers have voted for the Northern League”. Pause for effect: “The workers don’t vote for the Left any more. The Northern League is the new workers’ party”.

When they get stunned, they will likely follow the old script, and call this “Americanization” which by some miracle of illogic had not a single American involved, and on a continent where a cultural cleansing campaign to diminish the United States has been taking place for 40 years.

For the first time in history since the fall of the Fascist dictatorship, Italy’s parliament will not have a single “red” sitting on its benches […] The truth is that this tetchy, daydreaming, belligerently pacifist Left, which in recent years has said no to high speed trains, wind power, peace mission, pension reform and almost everything else, has lost on all fronts. […] As the Left glumly folds away its flags, Silvio Berlusconi, Gianfranco Fini and above all Umberto Bossi smile triumphantly in the background among the celebrating workers that the Left can no longer reach.

Inasmuch as they defined that history of political tumult, and that Berlusconi has been the first leader of the Republic to complete a term, it isn’t much of a surprise. On average, Italy has had an annual change of government called through overblown rhetoric, anger, corruption, and all the attendant lunacy of party-parliamentary politics.

You see, the parties have historically only addressed what they though the population wanted. The public votes for the party, the party forms the election lists and the governments... all is the party, not the individual. As such the notion of the individual’s reputation, integrity, etc., pale in importance to that of the parties’ internal jello-fights.

That hideous ‘cartel’ view of power, a sort of palliative on the way to creeping tyranny, is in fact that only home-made contribution European politics has made to democracy since the beginnings of an individuals’ rights before the law were founded in the Magna Carta.

- Via Brussels Journal