THE MORNING AFTER

If ever a country needed a morning-after pill, it was Italy this morning. As Italians went to bed last night - those who did bother to turn in, that is - there was no clear general election result and things weren't any better when they woke up this morning.  As I write, the number of seats allotted to each group in both parliamentary chambers is still changing and this is everybody's nightmare scenario here; an outcome so close that no one will be capable of governing, or at least, not for long.

You can see the results for yourself on the Ministero dell'Interno site and at the moment the centre-left coalition led by Pier Luigi Bersani has 340 seats in the Camera dei Deputati or lower chamber, Beppe Grillo's anti-corruption M5S [Five-Star Movement] has 108, Mr Berlusconi's centre-right coalition has 124 seats and Mario Monti's Scelta Civica coalition just 45 seats.  This makes Beppe Grillo's party - but not group because it is not part of one - the most popular in Italy.  In the Senate, the upper chamber, where seats are allocated according to regional voting, Mr Berlusconi's coalition has 116 seats, Mr Bersani's 113, Mr Grillo's party 54 and Mr Monti's group 18.  [I repeat - the situation is constantly changing and both the ANSA news agency and Corriere della Sera are now giving the figures as 119 for Mr Bersani and 117 for Mr Berlusconi in the Senate.]

In the Senate elections, Sicily went with the Berlusconi coalition, with Beppe Grillo's party coming a close second and Mr Bersani's coalition third.  In the Camera, however, Sicily favoured the Grillo Movement, with  the Berlusconi coalition coming second and the Bersani group third [with almost 50% less votes than the Berlusconi group]. The difference in this region's results for the two chambers may be explained by the fact that you have to be over 25 years of age to vote for the Senate.

In this election young people have had their say and what they have said is that they are fed up with corruption and do not want more of the same. They want jobs and hope and in my opinion it is the lack of hope offered by the undoubtedly sincere Mr Monti that has lost him the vote. You cannot tell people who were not even old enough to vote when the crisis began that, because of a situation which could not possibly have been their fault, they have to accept ever-increasing austerity measures with no end in sight and no dream to follow.  

As for Mr Berlusconi, as usual it is difficult to find anyone who will admit to having voted for him and some people will tell you that they are voting not for him, but for his coalition [which is technically true]. "I wouldn't vote for him but as a celebrity he's fantastic", remarked a friend of mine after one of Mr Berlusconi's recent  television interviews.  "That's just the trouble", I replied. "He's not a celebrity but your former Prime Minister" ["and", I might have added had the conversation taken place tonight, "possibly a future one."] I'm willing to bet that this friend did vote for Mr Berlusconi! Why?  Because "everybody's Silvio" represents Italians as some would like to see themselves, because they admire his business audacity and because, many would say, "Who else is there?"

"Grillo", we might answer. The Left's criticisms of Mr Grillo have been levelled at the fact that he and his party members do not have governmental experience and certainly, this makes many Italians doubt his ability to really carry through.  But who, among those elected previously, has done so?  Mr Grillo is so suspicious of Italy's political establishment and institutions that at one point on Sunday he was urging voters to "lick their pencils" in order to make it harder for an unscrupulous vote-counter to erase their mark.  If I might venture a personal opinion here I would like to tell Beppe that, much as I have always admired him, his scant attention to hygiene in this instance would not give me confidence in a member of his party as Minister of Health. But I always was a fussy soul and anyway, do not have the right to vote in Italian national elections [only local and EU ones].

As the night wears on, desperate attempts are being made to form a coalition capable of governing but I am not hopeful: this is a country in which getting to the point is not regarded as a virtue and anyone asking a question at a public meeting or conference embeds it in the middle of so much flowery rhetoric that often the addressee has no idea what is being asked; writers do not use paragraphs, a contract is treated much like a used bus ticket and an appointment is a vague arrangement which probably means, "I'll call you if I remember to think about it."  What we should be wondering at, then, is not that the political system doesn't work but that anything, ever, works at all. When it does, it works beautifully and stuns the rest of the world and I wish this could be the case with this election result.

As I close my post, there is still no clear winner but I fear that there is a clear loser; its name is Italy.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ROLES

Comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo's Sicilian tour has set me thinking about roles for, if he has a problem here other than convincing Sicilians to abandon the status quo, it is a particularly Italian view of people and their roles.  It works like this:

If you are a lawyer you will be expected to behave like a lawyer at all times and it will occur to no one that you might ever need to relax, so you will have to dispense legal advice wherever you are - on the beach, at a café table or from your car window as you speed past another driver that you know.  In exchange, you will be addressed as avvocato by everyone for the rest of your life, even in the unlikely event that you give up the law to become a shoeshine boy. And talking of shoes, if you happen to sell them, it would be regarded as eccentric, if not mad, to sell clothes as well.  Thus small towns like Modica have no department stores and no one [except me] misses them. This conformity, then, goes for places too, so the pharmacy doesn't sell perfumes, the supermarkets don't have pharmacies [though some deregulation has been mooted, to widespread protest] and when the underwear store started selling jumpers a few years ago it was regarded as a revolution.

A revolution, of course, is exactly what Italy needs, preferably with a 21st century economic miracle thrown in.  If we think back to another economic miracle, that of Japan in the post-war years, we may remember that one of the ways in which it was achieved was to put everybody, from managing director to apprentice, in company uniform and, when necessary but also in order to boost morale, chief executives worked on the shop floor.

Could such a thing ever happen in Italy?  In a country where, even during their busiest periods, bank and post office managers would not dream of taking their turn at the counters to reduce queues, it would require a sea change in attitudes. Managers are supposed to manage and to do that it is assumed that they must wear a suit and walk around looking important. Only in extreme circumstances would they suggest to their employees that they should try to complete transactions more quickly and I have seen this happen only once in my seven years of interminable waiting in such institutions.

In An Italian in Britain the Corriere della Sera journalist Beppe Severgnini observes, with some surprise, that in Britain,

"On weekends you can dress as you please.  A politician will let himself be interviewed walking his dog in the countryside wearing an ancient jumper and everyone seems to find this perfectly normal."

So there you have it, Mr Grillo:  a politician is not to be photographed doing mundane tasks like walking the dog, he wears a suit all the time and he probably shouldn't be a comedian too -  well, not intentionally, anyway.   However, it is just possible that the sea change began when you swam the Strait of Messina last week . For all our sakes, I hope so.

HE DID IT!

A quick update on yesterday's post:  at 12.10pm Beppe Grillo completed his swim across the Strait of Messina and as I write this, he is still on his feet and surrounded, as you might expect, by the microphones of journalists.  Whatever one may think of his politics, it should be admitted that the 3.2 km swim was quite an  achievement for a man of 64. Go, Beppe! 

A video of Mr Grillo's departure from Cannitello [Calabria] has been posted on his blog and I'm sure that other clips of the crossing will be posted there during the day.

"E che l'Italia ha bisogno della Sicilia, e non che la Sicilia ha bisogno dell'Italia" - "The point is that Italy needs Sicily, not that Sicily needs Italy", said Mr Grillo before leaving Calabria. 

GRILLING SWIMMINGLY

Comic-turned-politician Beppe Grillo - not, it must be said, universally popular in Sicily - is due on the island tomorrow to launch his M5S party's regional electoral campaign here.  The inimitable Mr Grillo has announced that he will not only travel by sea but will swim across the Strait of Messina, an undertaking that, as I write, is causing much jubilation on twitter, where, among other jokes, it is being suggested that this event may at last convince Sicilians of the need for the Messina Bridge.

Mr Grillo will leave Cannitello on the Calabrian coast at 10 am and hopes to arrive at Capo Peloro in Messina Province by 11.30, though Corriere della Sera, to name but one publication, does not believe that he will swim the whole way, given the fact that he is 64 and "is hardly an Olympic athlete".  The determined comedian is rumoured to have spent his summer holiday in Sardinia dieting and training for the purpose, though, so personally I wouldn't be surprised if he were to prove the pundits wrong .

Once safely on Sicily and, presumably, having taken a rest, Mr Grillo will undertake a complete tour of the island and is due in Ragusa on the evening of 14th October.  On the 15th he is coming to Modica for lunch and will do a walkabout in the evening.

I do hope he stocks up on Modican chocolate while he is here as he will need it for energy should he decide to swim back!

DON'T SAY THAT IN MODICA!

Beppe Grillo
Image:  Lucarelli via Wikimedia Commons

I am, on the whole, a fan of Beppe Grillo though I am beginning to believe that he falls into the category of people whom Lillian Hellman called "good rebels who are bad revolutionaries". [I rather hope I am one myself!] Here is what Miss Hellman has to say about such souls:

"Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, perhaps because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them."
- Lillian Hellman:  An Unfinished Woman

Anyway, in April Mr Grillo, whose anti-corruption Movimento 5 Stelle party has been winning important local elections in Italy, offended Sicilians when he said that even the Mafia doesn't strangle its victims but takes 10% protection money instead, the implication being that the government, with its anti-crisis measures, is "strangling" the electorate.  Obviously this is a hurtful remark, especially to those who have lost loved ones in anti-Mafia campaigns, and a storm of criticism ensued.

Rosy Bindi

Next Mr Grillo turned his attention to Rosy Bindi, the President of the Pd [Democratic Party]. Ms Bindi has been much maligned in the past, most famously on television in 2009 by Mr Berlusconi, who said she was "more beautiful than intelligent". [The saddest thing about this remark, I've always felt, was that Mr Berlusconi probably genuinely believed it to be a compliment.]  In July Mr Grillo, referring to the Democratic Party's stance on gay marriage, said that Ms Bindi had "probably not had cohabitation problems with the love of her life", earning himself the accusation of being "worse than Berlusconi" from Pd Secretary Pierluigi Bersani and winning few women friends in the process.

As if all that were not bad enough, now Mr Grillo has launched an attack on the Olympics with the following statement on his blog:

"I don't know, nor have I ever known in all my life, anyone who practises foil or sabre fencing, yet when the Olympics are on I'm proud if my country wins. Then for another four years, I couldn't care less.  It's not the athletes who win, but nations.  It's the trimph of nationalism."

You'd better not say that in Modica, Mr Grillo!

Italian Male Fencing Team, including Giorgio Avola from Modica, wins gold in London:

FURTHER UPDATE ON THE "BAVAGLIO"

Now, at last, Times Online has a take on it here. We have the amendment, which states that "Persons who have or use personal or collective internet sites, whether or not they carry products, and provided they do not constitute a profit-making company, will not have to register with the roc [Registro degli operatori della comunicazione]". Beppe Grillo is as unconvinced as I am that this is the solution, for he asks, as I asked on Tuesday, whether sites which, for instance, carry Google Ads, could be deemed "profit-making companies". This being Italy, I fear they might. The whole thing is still ambiguous. Grillo also points out that the rest of the world is now laughing at Italy.

I still think all this has happened because a group of politicians see bloggers as possible sources of revenue, first and foremost, but it could also be that they wouldn't mind shutting down blogs such as Grillo's. To me he is a very welcome thorn in the side of authority.

This is what I think will happen, for what it's worth: I think we will all, eventually, have to at least begin some ridiculous, costly - in time if not in money - process of "registering" ; we will be fed-up, irritated and worried to death as the procedures are very unlikely to be simple. And finally, when the government [whichever is in by then] realises that the idea is a non-starter and impossible to regulate, there will be a climb-down - not least because this law will be out of line with EU statutes.