ABSTRACT: A radical paradox/Part of the majority but with no ministries and ignored by the media. Intolerable and rude. But at the same time, the first to denounce the corruption and to organize campaigns for a more civilized country, which risks having to regret them.

(PANORAMA, 4 June 1994)

Somehow, when people talk about the radicals, about Marco Pannella, Emma Bonino and the whole group of these bothersome politicians whose origins are different from those of any other party, we (we journalists) feel the need to be sarcastic. And yet, if the radicals were to disappear, to be extinguished, swept away like the current of freedom and even as a recollection of freedom, we need to realize that this, not the neo-post-paleo-fascists-stalinists, would represent an irreparable damage for our democracy which is still very fragile and ailing for the pains of growing up. So farm the radicals have been the metabolism of parliamentary democracy and the one and only movement to have chosen popular activism as the linchpin of their existence. It is the only party to have practised those rules of concrete and visible democracy we were used to associating only to the Anglo-Saxon world, where "people" (yes, people) sit in the streets and resist passively to the police like Bertrand Russell did, demonstrate with

sandwich placards, gag themselves, chain themselves, let themselves be beaten up without reacting, spend the night in the middle of the street, making the protest visible. Everything, the televisions, have tried to make them invisible, ridiculous, annoying, intolerable, hateful. Not always without some good reason, of course, because the radicals' typical characteristic has always been (also) that of bothering the indifferent tranquillity.

They would have deserved becoming ministers and showing us (and themselves) what it means to administer and enforce rectitude and the testimony of an entire life spent at the service of democracy. Also, a government with the radicals would have offered far more concrete guaranties compared to the confused explanations and rectifications on fascism and post-fascism. Let's see why. The radicals represented the left-wing liberalism, proving - in total isolation - that it was possible to be leftist and at the same time anticommunist (but never in a hysterical way, always in a morally firm way) and the champions of the weakest parts of society; the poor, the different, the enemies, the old, the children, the sick and the healthy.

I can't say I know Marco Pannella all that well. But I know him fairly well. I remember the last time we met we were sitting at a cafe in Piazza Navona after talking with a group of French businessmen. We had talked about the mafia, about Italian politics, about everything, and then we sat down at a cafe. He kept smoking his terrible French cigarettes, and I noticed that this atypical Italian, this man who is no doubt self-conceited and narcissistic as he appears, is also the only one to have continued his battles for freedom, organizing and winning battles for everyone which he and a few other had invented, and I saw that he was bereaved. Forza Italia was nowhere in sight, no one could foresse what was to come, in fact it seemed quite obvious that the elections would have been won by the so-called progressive coalition.

Progressive? It is still a word that labels a mysterious package. Progress in what sense? Along what direction? The progress the radicals have pointed out was that of having been able, alone and in a time in which it was out of fashion, to represent what the long and painless and conformist aftermath calls "the new". Today's new for the radicals is age-old: they denounced the corruption when everyone else seemed to ignore it, or they adapted their battles for truth to the consociative conveniences. The radicals who now risk disappearing, suffocated by a radio-television silence that is applied to them like a gas mask, are the same one who organized the referendums in Italy who gathered signatures and who promoted the "participation" everyone is so keen on now. Then came divorce, the lay campaigns, abortion (which the radicals wanted to introduce along with reforms to safeguard women and children, which were never carried out).

The Italians do not owe the communists or the christian democrats and even less the neo-post-fascists for the controversial and anti-conformist characteristic of the civil rights campaigns. If some progress has been made in Italy compared to the sixties in relation to sex, maternity, women's dignity, respect of the handicapped, this is firstly thanks to a group of trouble-makers, joint smokers, exhibitionists, ball-breakers, anti-racists, rude and intolerable people, the radicals.

To realize how useful they are, we need only look at the hate they are the object of. The disgusted attitude of the people who vomit as soon as they are mentioned. Pity things went otherwise. With sense of reality, Pannella had tried to form the left-wing component of that government majority which is too rashly called "right". The Italian right is rather a fake right, considering that the left is a fake left. At the most there is a left-wing "mood", a left-wing sarcasm, a way of enjoying the forecast catastrophes which is typical of the left. But the Italian left is paying for its political even more than electoral failure because it has been incapable of thinking up anything that could come to represent a new frontier.

As to the right, in a European sense, it is ridiculous: it lacks the chief characteristic of the conservative right, i.e. the conservative feature. To be conservative you have to have something to conserve, and what can our right propose to conserve? Nothing, because there's nothing memorable. In fact, in the haste the entire system of communications is prey to, Berlusconi's mega-party, which has none of the characteristics of the right, proposing ingredients of common sense and administrative capability with which to favour the creation of new wealth to be re-distributed both in the form of "good government" (i.e. due service) and employment, is labeled as the "right". The fact that the Northern League is rightist also needs to be verified. Even the neo-post-ex-fascists feel uncomfortable as a right, because they are constantly seeking their popular roots, if anything somewhat nationalist and rusty. So where are the conservatives?

The conservatives in these sense of "those who can indicate something that deserves being conserved" are the radicals. What they can conserve is the style, the love and the taste for practical (i.e. democratic and inflexible) liberalism. Hardly anyone in Italy (with the exception of a few genuine liberals of Catholic, Republican communist and even liberal inspiration) can exhibit the faithfulness to the conservation of the form of democracy.

It is wise to know these things at a time in which extinction and oblivion are about to submerge one of the very few authentically Italian and genuinely Italian things produced by the fragile Italy. If the radicals disappear this country will feel the effects. And it will not be a release but its opposite.

Paolo Guzzanti

The less generous is Enrico Mentana, with his TG5: not one interview, not one word on Marco Pannella and his list. TG1 granted 16 seconds. TG2 one minute. According to the data of the Centro d'ascolto, presented by Pannella, Emma Bonino and Valeria Ferro to the presidents of the Chamber and Senate and to the guarantor for editorial activities, Giuseppe Santaniello, in the first fifteen days of electoral campaign for the European Parliament the RAI neglected the smaller parties in its newscasts. Finivest did no better: "it is serious that in this situation they have chosen not to offer citizens spaces of public service". The most generous with Pannella's reformers was Paolo Liguori, on Italia1: eight minutes. Next come TG4 (3 minutes) and TG3 (one minute and 7 seconds). Rai 3 granted due participations in "Milano, Italia" and Canale 5 offered Pannella to participate in the Maurizio Costanzo Show. The group was never mentioned by the other programs of Rai. What about the others? No mention for Greens, the Netw

ork, AD, PSI. Rifondazione did slightly better.