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GULF WIDENS BETWEEN POLITICIANS AND THE COUNTRY
Di Pietro's angry response to the end-of-year speech by the President of the Republic, Oscar L. Scalfaro, has united politicians against him and the country behind him.
Like a sudden earth tremor, the reply by former judge Antonio di Pietro (recently elected senator of the Republic) to the President's end-of-year speech has caused the existing gulf between political circles and ordinary people to widen.
President Scalfaro's speech
touched, predictably, on all the problems that the country is facing now and will have to face over the next few months of this long transitional period. To name just a few: "bribesville", a pardon or remission for the last few terrorists still in prison since the "years of lead" (1970s), constitutional reform, illegal immigration and refugees, unemployment, paedophilia. Paradoxically, given what followed, the President's whole speech was predicated on praise for the functioning of democracy in Italy, praise for the parliamentary majority and the government, and praise for the opposition for the role it has played at times of national crisis. Fine, except that the President, referring to the judiciary's "clean sweep" from 1992 onwards by means of the "bribesville" investigations, raised the matter - not for the first time - of "precautionary imprisonment used to say: speak out or you stay inside", and of "the jangling of handcuffs in front of the accused by some boorish judicial sidekick"; he even described the use of such practices by judges as "torture".
Antonio di Pietro, the former judge now famous around the world for his role in those very investigations as the driving-force behind the Pool of Judges based in Milan that looked into crimes of corruption, penned a curt reply to the President in an open letter published in the newspaper La Repubblica, using such words as "you've made allegations, now substantiate them", and turning his own accusations back against him: ".... and what did you do about that judge or his 'boorish' sidekick who jangled the handcuffs....?".
Di Pietro's resentment is due - as he himself explains - to the fact that the President's speech, which does not name names, has been used by various Members of Parliament, on both the centre-right and extreme left, to attack him or his ex-colleagues in the Milan Pool. Di Pietro has already sued for libel and slander some of those he has prosecuted and others accusing him of having abused the system of precautionary imprisonment, and has actually earned a sizeable sum from winning the lawsuits. He had hoped to put those accusations behind him once and for all but they are constantly being fired at him by his political opponents, who are protected by parliamentary immunity. Hence his exhortation to the President "not to hold back" and to "name names", so as to dispel any possibility of malicious interpretation.
This reasoning, which has not raised an eyelid among ordinary people, has been far less warmly received by almost the entire political class in Italy, which generally concurs that the power acquired by public prosecutors over the past five years is excessive. They are keen to find a solution to the "justice question", in other words to redress the balance during trials between the roles of prosecution and defence, or to separate the career of public prosecutor from that of ordinary judge (i.e. the prosecution from the presiding magistrate). These, then, are general or fundamental problems, but ones that the people - who tend to regard politicians as out-and-out rogues - consider less vital.
While the political debate is rekindled around Di Pietro, comment in the press ranges from "they're both in the wrong", in La Repubblica, to "Scalfaro beyond reproach; alarming behaviour by Di Pietro" in the Corriere della Sera. Meanwhile the newspaper editors and the President's office are being bombarded by faxes from citizens expressing their solidarity with Antonio di Pietro, who is ever more isolated in the political world but ever more popular with the people.
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