Love for Putin is a childhood disease that a government center-right must overcome
Is the crisis on the border with Ukraine serious? But above all, how can Italy deal with it in the coming days and weeks, especially if a sudden escalation should occur? The first question is easy to answer: on the border with Ukraine, the Russian army is amassing a quantity of men and weapons never seen since 2014, since Russia annexed Crimea with a coup and fueled the guerrillas. pro-Russian in Donbass (eastern Ukraine). This does not mean that a war will break out shortly thereafter, but Russia is still preparing to wage it. Faced with such a situation, in what conditions is Italy finding itself? This answer is also easy: vulnerable, considering that a naval officer, Walter Biot, was discovered in early April giving the Russians secret documents in exchange for money. But Italy's vulnerability lies not so much in Walter Biot who, according to his wife, acted like this only because he was in economic difficulty (3,000 euros a month, fixed salary), as in the many anonymous Italians, politicians, soldiers, civilians of all the professions, which would be willing to work for the Russians even for free, each according to his means and abilities.
It is useless now to pretend not to see the problem: Italy is one of the most pro-Putin countries in the West and the popularity of the Russian president (now eternal president) is widespread and rooted above all in the center-right parties and in the 5 Star Movement. It is clearly visible in every public demonstration, from the joy with which the few Russian military aid for the Covid pandemic in 2020 was welcomed, to the request for the Sputnik V vaccine even by those who are skeptical about vaccines in general (but for the one promoted by Putin is the only exception).
This popularity of Putin and his regime has been photographed in several polls. The last and most detailed dates back to the summer of 2018, conducted by Demos . Among foreign leaders, Putin appears to be the second most popular in Italy, just behind Angela Merkel. But in the center-right parties he comes first, even more than Donald Trump, with 31 per cent of the votes in Forza Italia and an incredible 49 per cent in the League. These consents have probably increased thanks to the propaganda of Moscow in times of pandemic, both for the aid sent to Bergamo, and for the promotion of the vaccine made in Russia . The popularity enjoyed by the permanent tenant of the Kremlin goes beyond his contempt for democratic rules, his declared hostility towards NATO (of which we too are part, even if we tend to forget it) and the more than justified suspicions that the his competitors and internal enemies, who died a violent death, have been eliminated at his will.
Is it spontaneous or cultivated popularity? Surely Russian propaganda has worked a lot, even in the Italian language. But he found extraordinary collaborators, first of all Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi, both regular guests at Club Valdai . In this case it is better to focus only on the center-right parties. Both the Democratic Party and the 5 Star Movement are in fact attracted, in a very unhealthy way, by every dictatorship, from the Chinese to the Russian one, passing through Turkey and Venezuela. On the other hand, Putin's love for Russia is a peculiar characteristic of the center-right, which is also historically aligned with Western democracies.
The center-right's love for Putin now has deep roots. Berlusconi, when the Russian army crushed little Georgia, far from maintaining a balanced position, gave a vibrant speech in defense of Putin's arguments, going so far as to compare the Georgian liberal reformer president Mikhail Saakashvili to "Saddam" (and it was so blatant that poor Paolo Guzzanti, former president of the Mitrokhin Commission, resigned from the parliamentary group of the PDL ). If Berlusconi has never hidden his friendship, even personal, with the Russian president, Matteo Salvini has inherited from the Bossian League a strong link with the Russian nationalist right. A bond that goes back to his friendship with Vladimir Zhirinovskij, leader of the ultra-right who wanted to destroy the US with atomic bombs, but promised to recognize Padania's independence. From the friendship with these singular figures of the post-Soviet world, the Bossian League then consistently matured its official defense of Milosevic's Yugoslavia, up to the dramatic days of the war in Kosovo (probably the only European separatist party cheering for the armed repression of a secessionist movement). And automatically the link has moved to Putin, especially since the Russian president has embraced a more nationalist political line. Salvini did everything to show his closeness to the Kremlin leader, with pop methods (having his photograph taken on Red Square with his celebratory t-shirt ), diplomats (the constant opposition to European sanctions) and party methods (the even formal association between the League and United Russia , Putin's party).
As for the fastest growing center-right party, Brothers of Italy, its sympathy for the Russian leader has been expressed in many ways. Among which also the compliments immediately sent by Giorgia Meloni to Putin on the occasion of his re-election, while in the rest of Europe it was almost taken for granted that those elections were fraudulent . At the local level, Adelina Putin's election campaign in Vicenza is memorable in its own way: “Do you want to vote for Putin? Now you can! ”. The slogan itself suggests that it is a winning tactic to exploit the popularity of the Russian "Tsar". The same slogan could not be used for other authoritarian leaders ("Do you want to vote Erdogan? Now you can!" "Do you want to vote Xi? Now you can!") And not only because their surnames are less common in Italy.
What's the problem now? That if the pro-Russian parties want to govern and assert themselves even among international partners, they must, in any case, abandon their Putinism and align themselves with Western politics. Literally in any case: even if the League wanted to group with the sovereign and Eurosceptic parties of Central Europe, among them is the Polish PiS, from whose point of view Russia is an existential danger. Even if it were decided to join forces with other conservative parties of the Anglosphere, both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were nevertheless consistently NATO leaders and treated Russia as a strategic opponent. Which is. And if the League wanted to complete the moderate change and, after joining the Draghi government, it also wanted to join the EPP, in that case it would be even "worse": if it is true that Popular leaders like Angela Merkel do business with the Kremlin, the official political line is with NATO against Russia, on the side of Ukraine against Russian interference, in defense of the Baltic countries against Putin's neo-imperial aims. Perhaps the only European partner that would guarantee the continuity of a pro-Moscow strategy is Marine Le Pen, but in recent years it has shown that it cannot or does not want to form an alternative European pole.
Leaving Putinism on the street would be a sign of great political maturity, even if we want to challenge the centralism and the leadership of the EU, together with the countries that suffer most from it. But it doesn't have to be an unfinished task. You cannot have a European wife and a Russian mistress, as was believed to be during the Cold War. You will have to love your wife. Given the levels of popularity enjoyed by the Russian leader, an unexplained Atlanticist or pro-European turn could generate disappointment, disillusionment, abandonment to realities even more alternative to the West. Keeping your feet in two shoes and pretending that between Atlanticism and Putinism there are no contradictions could be even worse: the schizophrenia of those who preach in one way and scratch in the opposite way sooner or later you pay, as shown by the case of Gianfranco Fini, heir of the electorate of the MSI who one day started talking (and voting) as a leader of a left-wing liberal party. And he lost everyone.
To achieve true political maturity, abandoning Putinism, the center-right parties will have to make the hardest choice: de-radicalizing their electorates. In this case: de-Russify them . How? After decades of pro-Russian narration, it will not be enough to say "I changed my mind". But you just have to start telling the truth.
In fact, all Russian propaganda is based on a mountain of lies, which the Italian friends of the Kremlin have always wanted to believe, even against all evidence of the facts. But it doesn't take much to take them apart, one by one. To understand that, for example, Russia, an ally of Iran, with entire regions (such as Chechnya) ruled by Islamic radicals and Europe's largest mosque in Moscow, is not a bulwark against radical Islam. Russia, an iron ally of China (with which it always votes together with the UN, in every single dossier) is not a bulwark against the Beijing regime. And it is so useless to retrieve the "realist" concept out of time "let's keep Russia good, because the real enemy is China", because both powers have been aligned against the West for decades now. Russia, first in the world for the number of abortions in relation to the population , is not even a bulwark of Christian values. Russia is not liberal, although many libertarians are keen to emphasize that it has a flat tax and a lower public debt than Italy. However, it is in 92nd place in the ranking of economic freedom ( Index of Economic Freedom ), when Italy, which does not shine with liberalism, is in 68th. For those who fear that sanctions will collapse the Italian market, Russia is not the first recipient country of Italian exports, but the 14th . And it is the 9th country of origin of our country's imports. It is not an economic power, but a country which, with its 145 million inhabitants, has a GDP (1.576 billion dollars) lower than that of Italy (2.086 billion dollars). If anything, it is a nuclear power, first in the world for the number of warheads, number and quality of missiles. And it is still at least in second place for conventional armed forces. A respectable military machine that has one main objective: to challenge NATO. That is us.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lamore-per-putin-una-malattia-infantile-che-un-centrodestra-di-governo-deve-superare/ on Thu, 15 Apr 2021 03:55:00 +0000.