...I wonder if I really want to be Italian.
Can you believe that 47% of my fellow Italians were stupid enough to elect a Prime Minister who is described by the Guardian as follows:
* * *
Fourteen years on, Berlusconi is again poised to return to power. Whatever else, he is not the joke figure he is sometimes made out to be. In fact, the outrageous statements that have earned him a reputation for buffoonery - at the last election, he likened himself to Jesus Christ - are often finely calculated, attention-grabbing devices.
...
He has been in trouble with the law continuously since the early 1990s, when Italian magistrates began probing the network of links that held together the country's corrupt postwar economic and political system.
He has been found guilty on several occasions, but his convictions have always been either overturned on appeal or timed out by statutes of limitation. He remains the subject of two trials in which a co-defendant is David Mills, husband of the British politician Tessa Jowell.
Some of the charges he faced in those cases have lapsed because of a law introduced by his own second and third governments, between 2001 and 2006. It was not the only legislation passed during that period that helped further his personal or business interests.
* * *
Can people really be so stupid? Can they? And, not only did they elect him, they voted for Bossi and the Lega Nord to have twice as many seats in Parliament as they had before. The uber-racist, misogynistic, semi-fascist Lega Nord; the ones who want to kick out all immigrants from Northern towns, who think people in the South are 'lazy'. It's fucking ridiculous and it makes me ANGRY, so angry.
I have few connections left with Italy. At the end of the day, I haven't lived there for over ten years, thirteen in fact, and I've only visited sporadically. Italian isn't even the language I speak on a daily basis anymore, and it's got to the point where saying "I'm Italian" feels a bit weird because, really, I don't belong anywhere specifically. But this makes me feel embarrassed to be Italian; the fact that people in my country elected a man who ridiculed us in front of the world, a man who thought it would be funny to joke about German politicians being SS officials in the European Parliament.
And you know what the first he's going to do is? He's going to let Alitalia go bankrupt, so his children can buy it off and have the Berlusconi family airline. And next thing we know... Ops! Another law that only makes him and a couple of other rich wankers happy! And then he's going to, you know, tell the Queen she should get laid more often! Ah! Funny man!
This is so sad it almost makes me want to cry.
(word count: 22,000. I have around 4,000 words left to write and then I'll be done! Yay. Editing sucks though.)