Political PR disaster: Mr. Antonio Di Pietro

In this blog so far I have never pointed my finger to the PR disasters of the Italian politics and from today I will concentrate in presenting you what should be avoided if you want to be elected. My palette would offer a large number of candidates to the trophy of bad PR, but today I will concentrate on Mr. Antonio Di Pietro. Who is Antonio Di Pietro? He was, with no doubt, the most famous magistrate of the Milan team that starting from 1992 brought to justice over 2500 people divided between politicians and influential figures. They had to answer of illegal political financing and corruption. Those were the years of ‘’Mani Pulite’’ (Clean Hands) operation.

As Prof. Domenico Pacitti said in his interview for Just, ‘’ Di Pietro became a sort of overnight national hero’’. Italians finally had the hope and proof that something was changing and that our politicians were called to answer of their misconduct.

Unfortunately, when the political parties understood that Di Pietro was too dangerous to the establishment and that they had to stop him (27 criminal charges were raised against him and years later dropped), he decided to resign from his position to avoid to have any conflict of interests. He understood that probably the best way to fight against political parties was to reform them from the inside and on the 28 of march 1998 he founded his own political movement ‘’Italia dei Valori’’.

So what went wrong with Mr. Pietro?

It immediately became clear to the audience that even if he was a great investigator and prosecutor, unfortunately he was poor in the art of public speeches. Every interview or public speech given by Di Pietro became the target of satirical comments. He simply couldn’t speak Italian correctly.

TV, magazines, newspapers continuously asked ‘’ How can we be represented in the parliament by someone that barely knows the Italian grammar?’’

Some commentators even doubted he really had a University degree. The level of suspect got to such a high peak, he had to publicly show his degree in law during a TV show!

So did this experience teach him something?

Well, no, it didn’t. He even did something more controversial. He opened a blog in two languages, Italian and English.

And guess what? His English version of the blog was full of spelling and grammar mistakes.

Mr. Di Pietro became the target of a new wave of jokes that signed his reputation and consequently his political fortune for the future ahead.

Will Antonio Di Pietro learn the lesson this time? Will he be able to win the mass public approval he had at the time he worked as a magistrate?

I doubt it.