Listen to the audio version of the article
Can a journalist pretend to be a party militant, to get to know its ideas, impulses and deep feelings from the inside? And does this constitute a worrying novelty and a risk for democracies, as claimed by the Prime Minister to the point of evoking practices of authoritarian regimes and calling for intervention by the head of state?
The topic is serious: every association can reasonably aspire to ensure that what is said in its meetings remains within the participants and is not disclosed externally. However, democratic regimes themselves establish that politics must be carried out in the open and therefore that the public has the right to know the organization, aims and ideas of a party.
What the democratic state guarantees is that the internal debate must not be conditioned by interference from those who exercise public power. And, in fact, dictatorships of all sorts have always used spies who pretended to be opponents, to infiltrate dissident groups, register their members and repress them.
During fascism, we always need to return there, a political police, the Ovra, was even created with the task of discovering “subversive associations”, infiltrating and dismantling them. And it is not unlikely that something of this kind occurred illegally even in the Republican period, especially in the era of the Cold War and terrorism.
The case of FanPage is, however, completely different: in dictatorships, it is the authoritarian power that uses its secret apparatus to repress dissent; today, it is investigative journalism that reveals the secrets of power and the existence of numerous exponents of a governing party still attracted by the worst ideologies of the twentieth century.
