Italian election goes sotto voce

Italian election goes sotto voce

Italy will be holding regional elections on March 28, so you’d think that, like in other Western democracies, political journalists would be at their busiest and the TV schedules dominated by debates on the most pertinent issues of the elections.

Well, no. Quite the opposite.

The government has pushed through rules which essentially make it impossible to hold a political discussion on TV in the month leading up to the election.

The new rules stipulate that if ONE candidate is interviewed or mentioned, representatives of ALL other opposing parties have to be present as well.

Bear in mind the plethora of parties usually contesting italian elections (30 and counting) and you’d have a town-hall style debate where the people on stage would outnumber the audience.

Instead of outraged protest, the State TV channel RAI (paid for by a compulsory licence fee of around $150 a year for every italian household) actually went one further and has taken its main political programmes off the air completely.

So in spite of the protestations of journalists, the result is that there is no  political debate on TV right now. And there won’t be until after the election.

The new rules may be strict, but Italians are masters at circumventing restrictions, so one of the few independent TV channels, La7, has kept its political programmes on air.

Only problem is, they’re not allowed to mention politics.

Or politicians. I took part in one such programme, called Tetris, and before going on air was briefed that we couldn’t specifically refer to anyone by name.

However, we seemed were free to use nicknames for various political figures. For example, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was referred to as the “President of Milan Football Club” which of course, he is.

So the end result was eight journalists on TV talking for two hours in some sort of code because they can’t mention the name of any politician. All this, weeks before the country goes to the polls.

At first it seemed funny. But we’ll really see who’s laughing only after the election.