General Vannacci's hallucination

Vannacci is the perfect politician for this era: created by his enemies, fed by the talk shows, useful to the right, indispensable to the left. Until he stops being a caricature and becomes a party.

To write this article I watched an entire episode of Otto e mezzo, even though three clips online would have been enough to reach a few simple conclusions. The first is that Roberto Vannacci knows how to be on television. The second is that he has that look which in Italy is often mistaken for sexual ambiguity but actually just means someone keeps themselves in shape at sixty. The third is that Vannacci doesn't want to be proved right. He wants to be proved wrong in prime time.

The Italian left has always had a certain talent for creating its own monsters, but it had rarely managed to do so with such generous promotional spirit. If you have a book coming out, you no longer need to hope they'll censor it: you need to hope Repubblica denounces it. And so Il mondo al contrario, a book that might have stayed an object shared around Telegram groups, became a national talking point. The themes were always the ones dear to the right: natural family, immigration as siege, too much frociaggine. The bestseller became the programme of Futuro nazionale, and a media spectacle.

In the Vannacci-Gruber affair the role-playing is almost perfect. He lends himself to being pressed on homophobia, racism, sexism, reactionary language. She immediately becomes a meme while she slaps him around: "Are you faithful?", "He married a non-EU woman", "How many U-turns has he done!", "You like your armchairs too". When he says to her, sibylline, "you like the illegals", she tells him not to talk nonsense. The audience will share the same video clip on social media and read it in opposite ways. The left-wing one will write: "Gruber blasted him." The one who sees himself as a patriot will write: "He flattened her."

Both are right, and both are wrong at the same time. Television confrontation also works as a format of legitimation. Vannacci doesn't need to win on the merits. He only needs to occupy the role of the persecuted. He needs to be questioned, corrected, regarded with a certain disbelief. To look out of place in exactly the right place. Besides, politicians, like television programmes, are measured in percentages.

Then we get back to Vannacci, but first we need to talk about Gwyneth Paltrow.

The press and the internet lost their minds because Paltrow fronted a luxury residential complex in Herzliya, an Israeli city. In the video she wakes up in an obscenely expensive interior, complains that morning comes too early, drinks her coffee, goes for a run in the park. The typical problems, in short, of every resident of that dusty strip of land. They called her queen of genocide, which is still always better than fascist.

I know what you're thinking: she's getting ahead of Trump's real-estate project in Gaza; she's never read a newspaper; she lives outside the world, between vaginal candles and chic spiritual retreats. But just because she's blonde doesn't mean she's naive.

Maybe — and here I'm asking for a leap of imagination — Gwyneth Paltrow simply preferred the sponsor's money to the approval of people who would never buy a multi-million-dollar apartment in Israel. Maybe she calculated the risk of a borderline promotion in a time of war crimes and decided it was worth it. She didn't post the ad on her own Instagram profile, meaning she didn't hand herself over to the pro-pal twenty-somethings with dyed hair who would have explained that they, personally, wouldn't be moving into her luxury property.

Paltrow knows something Vannacci has also understood: audiences are separate. A campaign that damages you with one audience can strengthen you with another. The audience that hates you almost never coincides with the audience that buys from you. And if they don't buy, they can't boycott. They can only be outraged — which means working for free to distribute the content.

Paltrow sells an aesthetic-political status to an audience that probably isn't scandalised by Israel. Vannacci sells political presence to an audience that isn't scandalised when Gruber calls him retrograde.

When Gruber asks why he seems obsessed with gay people, he answers that gay people already have rights — they can go to hospital, they can drive. They're lucky people and they don't know it. (It's very funny that Gruber and Vannacci both try very hard to say "Lgbtq+" — does Vannacci's audience know they're talking about invertiti?)

The only moment Vannacci seems to genuinely heat up is when Gruber questions his loyalty. Vannacci replies that he is loyal to his own ideals, not necessarily to the men who put him on the ballot. Then he adds that Salvini used him to win votes, so they used each other. It would be the perfect plot for a Brokeback Mountain in reverse.

Everything had seemed perfectly normal when at a certain point Vannacci started speaking in French. It's a concession to Gruber's audience. He wants them to know he's not some tracksuit-wearing oaf with city names printed on his chest, not a Fantozzi of bulldozers, football and mortadella. He wants to say: I come in peace, I'm respectable, my right is not extreme, it's just right-wing, I even speak languages. Vannacci says the same things Italian conservatism has said for years, only today Italian conservatism says them more carefully because it governs. I'm eagerly awaiting the relais châteaux spot in Israel.