The massive pan is on the boil. The gas is on. There are guests for dinner. They should be bringing the food with them (as ever), salami and pork sausages, salmon and parmesan cheese, but they arrive empty-handed. The parties welcome them as though they were guests, but they came on their own without telling anyone. Someone has a carrot and a few onions to give flavour to the water. The newcomers are hungry, they have an atavistic hunger for democracy. The parties treat them like saviours. The citizens who have invited themselves and the parties, are, have to be, a new, inseparable, monolithic demonstration of democracy. That’s what the secretaries on the Left, Right and Centre say! It must be true if no one says it’s not. No party has lost. Almost all have won with the candidates of the others, often against the candidates of the others, but what does it matter ….. “Scurdammoce 'o passato.”
The party secretaries and their lackeys, the journalists, feel like marvellous surfers on the wave of change, a wave used to rise even higher, to travel with a favourable wind. Anyway the table is already set, the usual dining table at which the citizens act as waiters and eat up the left-overs. The dishes, however are desolately empty, there’s such hunger. Someone makes a proposal; perhaps it’s Veltroni, a great idea, to sacrifice the fattened calf for the return of the prodigal sons to the common house of party-ocracy. There’s not even a glimpse of a fattened calf, but there’s no lack of big fat beef cattle. The big pan was bubbling away for them all along, and they didn’t know it, and the big fat beef cattle are there, seated with their forks in their hands, the various people like Bersani e Letta, Fassino, Fini and Casini, Vendola and Cicchitto. A separate saucepan is reserved for Borghezio. The cannibals of party-ocracy offer no discounts. They’ve been on a diet for decades. Not even the bones of the parties will be left. The wind of change is blowing ever stronger and it cannot be contained. It started blowing in Greece, then in North Africa, now in Spain, tomorrow in Italy. Direct democracy will not tolerate the intermediation of the parties. It will not delegate its own future to the papier-mâché TV leaders. To good-for-nothings that elect themselves as representatives for money or for visibility. In the new world, each one counts for one. The cannibals are hungry. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.