Has the Italian Parliament become black? No, just a bit dirty. Mussolini would have been ashamed to have been shoulder to shoulder with people convicted for mafia and for corruption. The definitive convicts are in the PDL “but also” in the PDminusL. The living dead of the Left denounce the disappearance of public opinion. That that they have ignored, taunted, insulted. Populist, justicialist, “qualunquista”. For this lot, if the general public don’t have their opinions, they don’t exist. I have the idea that the convicts, even for really serious crimes, definitive or at the first or second level, think they have got away with it. There might be a reason for this. Topogigissimo Veltroni with his shadow government is an Italian-style farce. You’d need Alberto Sordi with his inimitable raspberry to define him. The Lodo Alfano has made the Band of Four untouchable and the psycho-dwarf is finally relaxed.
I want to reassure Curzio Maltese, Nanni Moretti, Eugenio Scalfari and the Intellectuals of the Left. The general public exists! It was there in all the squares in Italy to discuss energy, renewables, WiMax, the sustainable economy. In Bologna on 8 September 2007, in Turin on 25 April and in Piazza Navona on 8 July 2008. Its voice is talking about the future and they are the past. They can’t manage to hear it. The request for a law for a Clean Parliament has been ignored. Parliament is more infected than before, more distant from the people than before. Deputies and Senators, wives, lovers, mates, lawyers, corrupted and corrupters are “appointed” by the parties. Parliament has become a public location for private actions.
The other nations are overtaking us in everything, even in justice, even in South America. A blog has indicated that in Brazil the AMB, (Association of Brazilian Magistrates) is promoting the “Eleições Limpas” {Clean Elections} initiative. In Brazil, right from 1990, it’s possible to elect candidates who have definitive convictions, thanks to a popular law. The AMB has asked that at the forthcoming local elections even those who have been convicted at the first level should not be eligible for election. The STF (Supreme Federal Tribunal) has turned down the request. So the AMB has started a collection of signatures for a new popular law.
Brazilian candidates are not different from ours. Their convictions go from corruption, to money laundering, to extortion, to drug trafficking. There is a tiny difference, Brazilian public opinion is not considered to be justicialist because people don’t want to be represented by convicts. The magistrates are not subversive if they ask for a clean up in Parliament in the government and the United Opposition don’t pass their time protecting each other from the citizens.
The AMB publishes on its website the up-to-date list of all the candidates who have an ongoing trial. In Italy it’s done by a comic. In Brazil the magistrates.