Politics, judiciary and vaudeville
Considerations on the sidelines of Silvio Berlusconi's acquittal. The italics of Teo Dalavecuras
It was a good race. His daughter Marina sacrificed herself exclaiming that yes, justice has been done, but the price paid was too high: sacrificed to the inevitable, all too predictable joke of the Fact which sounded something like this: "Of course, with all the millions disbursed to olgettine…”.
The loyalists of Forza Italia sacrificed themselves in turn, knowingly, with yet another useless request for a parliamentary investigation into the political use of justice, a useless request because the results of such an investigation are already written in the collections of newspapers and periodicals and in the too many books cluttering up our shelves. The great magistrate who, having reached the age of retirement – but not necessarily of peace – exercises his magisterium on the pages of the newspapers (but he did it even before), without sacrificing himself, signals the hypothetical risk that the Court, in acquitting the decades-old defendant may have felt intimidated by the failure of the Italian State to bring a civil action; as if, in order to ensure the independence of justice in practice, the State should hypothetically support the prosecution not only through the magistrates in charge, but also "on its own".
There was no lack of a rich debate on the "quibble" that would have allowed the acquittal for non-existence of the fact, as the people heard as witnesses should have been so as potential co-defendants, with the related guarantees and immunities: more than a quibble, the very basis of the rule of law, as Mattia Feltri rightly pointed out who however, immediately after, let it be understood that those who ride the quibble of the quibble (in fact the extended array of opponents of the Knight) opt for the ethical state. In the end, Feltri too decided to sacrifice himself: is anyone willing to believe that the Knight and his historic antagonist, the Engineer, have the slightest interest in the ethical state?
There is an ancient popular saying that reads "it has something to do with the ass and the forty hours" and before speaking or writing about ethics about the interminable feud between the faction of the Knight and that of the Engineer, one should always repeat it.
It remains that the relationship between justice (or rather, the magistrates) and power continues to be a toad that Italian society is unable to spit out or swallow, and every time the topic becomes topical again they are inflicted on the public on the one hand the blameless magistrates who, as soon as there is talk of separation of careers, mount the barricades and on the other the flights of "laymen" who make promises of "reform" of justice, on average lacking in credibility.
Conceptually, the question of the relationship between magistrates and power is not complicated. As Giuliano Ferrara wrote in an unusually staid article a few days ago, "everything revolves around the question of the independence of the judiciary from the executive (…) and, conversely, around the protection of the elective power from undue interference by the judiciary which makes politics, which makes choices in oblique contrast with the will of the people”.
The question is as simple in concept as it is in fact intricate. America solved it a long time ago by entrusting the appointment of magistrates to the people (but not those of the Supreme Court which is instead entrusted to the choice of the Executive and to the control of the Legislative). In France, the President of the Republic is the "guarantor" of the independence of the judges who, being "guaranteed" by it, are in some way subordinate to him. All systems have pros and cons, the Italian one is… Italian.
Article 104 of the Constitution establishes that "The judiciary constitutes an autonomous and independent order from any other power". In short, the judiciary is not a power (it is an "order"). But it is autonomous and independent of any "other" power: we could think that the authors of the most beautiful constitution in the world had some problems with the Italian language, but unfortunately we know that the legislators of our house know Italian only too well, and they sacrifice it to the true divinity that governs our destinies, which is neither God nor Mammon but simply ambiguity.
Cunning as well as paternal, the founding fathers pretended to place the judiciary in an empyrean, while knowing full well that the survival of any state requires a minimum of cohesion between the different powers and that, although the government and the judiciary have two different jobs, there are circumstances in which lack of coordination can be fatal. They left their heirs the privilege of regulating the matter if they ever felt like it.
What emerges with crystalline clarity from Luca Palamara's books is the way in which this coordination is implemented in Italy. This is done through endless negotiations that reflect more or less volatile structures between factions – both on a political level, on a corporate level, and between the two levels – and which translate into long chains of exchanges of favors (which, however, do not necessarily and perhaps not so frequently, illicit). Every now and then the mechanism jams and has to be restarted: computer viruses arrive, the scandal explodes and sheltered from the noise of the scandal, the machine restarts.
A dynamic that recalls the "regulatory model" of the Palio di Siena.
We speak of trivial truths but, in a country where – as Ennio Flaiano said – the shortest line that connects two points is the arabesque, they are unpronounceable truths, so that the factions have (until now, in the future we will see) lined up along the opposing fronts of “giustitialismo” and “guarantee”.
In fact, the triumph of justicialism coincides with the triumph of the judiciary understood as a separate body which fills, according to an eternal physical law, the void left by the progressive ankylosis of the political system. Other than "political use of justice". It may exist in the "dossier wars" between leaders but in these cases recriminating for the role of the judiciary is nonsense. There was when, after the Hot Autumn of 1969, the political class took refuge under the robes of the praetors, entrusting them with the management of industrial relations in Italy. The latter did not have to be asked.
As, in general, the judiciary has never been asked when it has had front-page tasks, from the Montesi case to the oil scandal of the early 1970s in Tangentopoli and far beyond. The only sure thing is the impossibility, for those who don't have privileged sources of information, to understand who uses whom.
Needless to say, all of this is in the nature of things, it would be enough – but I know it's an immoderate claim – that we were spared at least a small part of the orgy of rhetoric that substantiates public discourse on these topics.
In fact, I realize that we live in a society of entertainment and we in the paying public have nothing to say but only to applaud. However, there is a question of limits, an eminently “aesthetic” question. When I saw, in Corriere di Domenica, an entire page dedicated to Matteo Messina Denaro's readings, complete with photographs of a so-called bookshop in the "den" (who knows how they got it…), I wondered if, by now, we are not entered at full sail in the vaudeville society.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/politica-magistratura-e-avanspettacolo/ on Tue, 21 Feb 2023 06:37:06 +0000.