Terror always pays those in power. And as we have seen even more with the pandemic, if this terror is induced by the big media and social networks. Now everything works in a very short time and the social networks, engines of the mood of the community, have changed their sign during Covid.
The campaigns to distinguish fake news from the truth, all in favor of existing governments, have created a groove in the soul especially of the new generations. In the last two years social media have abandoned the anti-system orientation of some time before, when on the wave of the advancing new they brought before Donald Trump in the White House and then the M5S in government in Italy.
It’s theirs current orientation is good for those who govern which has no intention of undermining it oligopolistic position on the markets.
Six out of ten citizens did not go to the second round of the Italian administrative elections in 2021. And even the latest spin doctor knows that when abstention increases, whoever is in power wins. Abstention shows the distance between the voter and the political offer. And if the offer is terror and improvisation, it is easy to predict the results. It has always been like this in the history of Italy. Two cases above all: during the red two-year period (1919-1920), with the advent of fascism to consolidate the power of the land classes, during the years of terrorism (70s of the last century). You do not vote for the opposition when fear dominates, but you give the vote to those who already have the power and can reassure, restoring the status quo. Social media today amplify these values and delete (ban) the rest.
The center-right ruling groups then, like their own electorate, tend to be more attentive to values such as freedom. But this is not an age of freedom, it is a time when fear is a positive value. Even the bulletin of the daily deaths, with which the Italian government has cheered us for more than a year during Covid, has done its little job (only in Italy it can be thought that daily analyzes made on unequal data, collected arbitrarily and withdrawn from any type of verification).
In addition, in Italy there is the conjunction of the second round of the administrative, which acted in this case, where the 5-star electorate (the management team is now an offshoot of the Democratic Party, moreover the part most attentive to maintaining power as it is, given the irremediable collapse of consensus) is added to that of the left, defeating any opponent.
But it is a narrative problem: how we decide to tell reality, whether with rationality and balance or with dramatic and apocalyptic surprises ready to explode. “Nice experience to live in terror, right? This is what it means to be a slave ”, said a character from the incomparable Blade Runner. Therefore, the Italian center-right is wrong today to accept, even in the few spaces granted by the big media (space is not counted with the minutes of exposure, as idiots think, but with the quality of the context, that is, how much that area is ” prepared “to amplify your power or your credibility) a narrative of the pandemic made up of daily dramas, almost we lived in a telenovelas in which the only person responsible for disappearing is the government which, with its own management, has 131,000 dead to its credit.
The right center did not understand that Something is changed. By submitting to the climate of terror that the information system has amplified during the pandemic, they will lose the credit accumulated in recent years. If they do not change their approach and do not attack the problems of the territories in a more targeted and concrete way, with a profound reworking of the phase, the game is uneven and the result is a foregone conclusion: social networks, major newspapers, TV and opinion makers all row on the same side, acting in an almost symbiotic way on moods.
In this story he fits perfectly the story of a respectable man, the lawyer and university professor Enrico Michetti, wanted by Giorgia Meloni as a center-right candidate for the office of mayor of Rome.
At the time of his candidacy, Michetti has been conducting a very popular program for six years RadioRadio, much followed antenna of Lazio. He is an appreciated professional, both for administrative skills and for moderation and wit, he is a professor of law of local authorities, the same one he uses in making the management of public affairs understandable even to housewives. On the right they even consider him a Christian Democrat, certainly not “one of their own”. “Maybe it’s too good”, a center-right exponent questioned at the beginning of the election campaign mentioned to me, implying that the proverbial calmness of the candidate might not be a virtue.
Before the election campaign, “In July with a survey that we did from Political thermometer“, Explains Gianluca Borrelli, head of the polling institute, “Michetti was given to about 38% of the votes”. A good record: first and with a gap of many points on the opponents.
But as soon as a candidate he finds himself all against, first of all the heavy press. And it becomes in order: an amiable serial gaffeur, a friend of the most bizarre No Vaxes, coming from the extreme right and finally even a full-blown anti-Semite. Social media amplify the findings, each time with increasingly harsh campaigns (now it is no longer possible to distinguish between influencers and journalists or at least people no longer distinguish them). Complaints, denials, proofs to the contrary are useless. The fight is unequal for Michetti. The game is played on the short and on the moods, as we said. With the result that the majority of the center right did not even go to the vote. Michetti stopped where he started, 39.85%, and was pulverized.
In the 15 municipalities the center-right has the same fate: only one is awarded. AND the moderate component of the Roman right, i.e. that of Forza Italia, votes Carlo Calenda, more similar and more exposed thanks to national TV.
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