Compared to the past, when Rai certainly did not lack the influence of politics both on the editorial staff and on the program schedules, according to Corrado Augias there is a substantial difference that the Meloni government brings with it. Interviewed by Annalisa Cuzzocrea in La Stampa, the writer who has worked on state TV for 60 years explains it after the strike by Usigrai, the historic RAI union, which recorded a membership percentage of less than 90% for the first time: «When the communists arrived, the RAI was parliamentarized, the DC had the 1, the socialists the 2, the communists the 3. Even Berlusconi, apart from a few acts of ferocity such as the Bulgarian edict, a gesture of “divine” anger, he wasn’t asking for much. His thoughts were on ballerinas. Not these – explains Augias referring to the centre-right majority in office – They arrived to impose a vision of the world”.
According to the writer, the new course that would have been imposed by the center-right aims to «start from scratch with a counter-narrative to the constitutional one. But it is a crude, childish, approximate narrative. Born in the conventicles of the Social Movement, while they brooded among themselves full of resentment and frustration because they had been kept out.” Augias gives the example of Antonio Scurati’s monologue and the accusations of censorship. For the writer, that was “a fanatical and stupid gesture” which “can only be explained by the zeal of the official who believes he has understood that the time has come to be able to do something like this, because the climate allows it”.
The Rai strike split the editorial staff, between those who supported the Usigrai battle with 75% abstention and those who instead supported the line of Unirai, the union considered close to the positions of the government which boycotted the initiative . Unirai, according to Augias, is «a technically yellow union, that is, the boss’s union as there was at Fiat at the time of the harshest industrial conflicts, there had never been at Rai. It’s incredible what happens.” Augias’ fear is that with the government in office we will arrive at an “Orban model”, that is, a “progressive, painless narrowing of the democratic space, like the story of the boiled frog”. And there would have been some signs, explains the writer, starting with the reforms in the pipeline which would impose «limits on the judiciary, limits on the powers of the President of the Republic, a reform that leads to capocracy. That’s where we arrive, in the inadvertence of the masses who have other problems, other concerns. Or they don’t care.”
