‘Crazy Italians!’ you might think. Offered the choice between Bunga Bunga Berlusconi, an ex-Communist and a Brussels stooge, one in four of them went and voted for a stand up comedian.
Ever since Beppe Grillo’s shock success in the Italian elections, serious pundits in the mainstream media have been inviting us to disapprove. We are supposed to roll our eyes at the idea that Italians seem unwilling to accept austerity. We are meant to tut tut at the failure of their democracy to produce a stable administration willing to take instruction from the Eurosystem.
This only goes to show, imply the poobahs and the pundits, that Italian democracy is in crisis. Nonsense. What happened in Italy shows that politics is – thanks to the internet – being reborn.
Politics in the West, I speculate in my book on iDemocracy published last year, is going to be ‘shaped by groups of like-minded people, mobilising online’.
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