The CGIL, Piazza San Giovanni and electoral silence
Italics by Paola Sacchi
One hundred thousand or two hundred thousand, no one knows. This morning the big newspapers are competing for the number of participants yesterday in the trade union demonstration in Piazza S. Giovanni.
Solidarity with the CGIL, whose national headquarters was vandalized by the neo-fascists, luckily a minority in this country, of Forza Nuova, is right, indeed necessary.
However, a precedent remains: the breaking of the democratic rule of electoral silence. As yesterday we immediately pointed out in a tweet .
And this unfortunately in the silence of recent days of observers, political analysts and so on.
It will be said that trade unions must not comply with this rule. And yet, we are not hypocrites, as the historian Marco Gervasoni writes today in the front page editorial of the Giornale .
As we ourselves pointed out yesterday in other tweets, in the front row there was, a handful of hours from the vote, the candidate of the Democratic Party and the other left for Rome.
He certainly did not speak. But with him there was also the presence of leaders and ministers of the left and of the Five Stars lined up in a significant parterre.
So much so as to maliciously think: also general rehearsals of the new container on the left for the 2023 policies or when will they be?
We do not want to embark on the discussion whether the demonstration was to be, probably rightly, against all totalitarianism and therefore against fascism and communism, as the center-right had asked, premising that in any case it had to be done after the ballots of today and tomorrow.
The fact remains that a few hours after the vote, a demonstration against fascism was broadcast, which fortunately died in Italy several years ago.
And that image of the red square, the historic square of many important trade union battles, is now virtually opposed in the collective imagination to a non-existent, virtual "black square", where one runs the risk of seeing fascists everywhere, even among those who pose the problem of the rules democratic: that is, the objective breaking of electoral silence, however one thinks on the political level.
The clear majority of the Italian regions and thousands and thousands of municipalities are administered by the center-right. Administrators, are millions of voters a "black square"?
We're not really joking. Also out of respect for the important history of the CGIL, however, if you think about it politically.
And also because unfortunately the unresolved issues on why the devastation of the national headquarters was possible, in Corso d'Italia, in Rome, a stone's throw from the buildings of the institutions, have not yet been clarified.
The explanation given so far by the Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese, as Francesco Damato pointed out in this newspaper with his “Graffi” , has aroused strong perplexity even on the left.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-cgil-la-piazza-san-giovanni-e-il-silenzio-elettorale/ on Sun, 17 Oct 2021 10:50:27 +0000.