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19 May1968
Election day
Author
Bigi Pierino
Format
8mm
Credits
Music by Guglielmo Pagnozzi

Election day arrived, 19 May 1968. In Reggio Emilia, Pierino Bigi amused himself by filming the election slogans of all the parties, starting with the Liberal Party. Vote DC, vote Socialist Party, vote Italian Social Movement, the party furthest to the right and heir to the fascist tradition: 'without us Italy would wake up communist'. And above all, if you vote Italian Communist Party and Left Unity in the Chamber of Deputies, "Italy will change." In Reggio Emilia, the left has always been strong and counted its dead in July 1960, when a demonstration was repressed with police weapons fire. A massacre. There are no electoral queues, Bigi's election city is deliberately empty. Perhaps this act on which representative democracy is founded is being emptied of meaning? Yet the voters in the chamber will be 92% of the electorate and the DC will win with 12,437,848 votes (39.12% of the total) and almost 4 million votes more than the PCI, The funniest part of the film is the finale with the next day's newspapers. The same data are read in diametrically opposite ways by newspapers of different political factions. For the Resto del Carlino there is a sharp drop in the Socialists, while L'Avanti obviously writes on its front page of a 'socialist affirmation'. L'Unità in big letters: 'Victory!' underlining the good result in the Senate. For L'Avvenire, the DC and the centre-left were strengthened while for the left-wing newspapers they were not. We wonder whether Sixty-Eight remains outside the ballot box or where it is on 19 May 1968.

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