Each Sanremo festival has its controversy.
But this year, the Italian song festival has not started that it is already at the heart of a lively debate on the other side of the Alps.
The cause: Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Ukrainian president must intervene on February 11 in video during the final of the festival, a real transalpine institution.
If you do not know this high mass of Italian song, you surely know several former participants or winners: Laura Pausini, Eros Ramazzotti, Toto Cutugno, Andrea Bocelli or even more recently Måneskin, all the Italian stars have done it one day. stage.
Created in 1951, it lasts a week in February each year, and reaches audiences that would make TF1 or France 2 pale: last year, the 2022 edition brought together an average of 11 million viewers each evening and 58% of the market, peaking at over 13 million on Saturday for the final.
It's very simple, it's the event that inspired the creation of Eurovision.
From children to great-grandparents, these evenings of endless broadcasts (allow 3 to 4 hours for the final) monopolize the attention of all of Italian society, and where everyone has their opinion on the potential winner.
And of course, politics also sometimes gets involved.
Opposition between political parties
Since the announcement on January 16 of the broadcast of a message from Zelensky, the Italian political class has been flaring around the process.
From the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini to Giuseppe Conte (Five Star Movement) to the elected officials of Forza Italia, "it is considered inappropriate" to retransmit such a message, notes RAI, which broadcasts the festival.
"We hope that Sanremo remains the Italian song festival and nothing else," said Matteo Salvini, quoted by SkyNews Italia.
Salvini: "Zelensky? Spero che il festival resti riservato alla musica".
He leader of the Lega commented on the annuncio dell'intervento, with a video message, del presidente dell'Ucraina al Festival di Sanremo.
#ANSA https://t.co/jtlVknatp9 pic.twitter.com/grYNam9l5X
— Agenzia ANSA (@Agenzia_Ansa) January 26, 2023
An online petition has already gathered more than 78,000 signatures against the intervention of Volodymyr Zelensky.
But at the same time, part of the left of the Democratic Party and the Brothers of Italy, the far-right party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are largely in favor of it.
“It is important that Italians hear the direct testimony of those who resist the brutal Russian aggression”, reacted in La Stampa the secretary general of the radical left party + Europa.
A controversy that has agitated the country for two weeks, and which dismays some journalists: “We are talking about a recorded intervention of about two minutes (…).
A choice that, in any normal country, would be greeted with the reaction it deserves: a vague wink, a gesture of obvious normality.
(…) And yet, with us, it is a matter of state”, denounces the daily La Repubblica, which recalls that the former president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev had been invited to the 2009 edition.
The television board is looking into it
Faced with the scale of the controversy, in a country where public television has historically been politicized, RAI's board of directors must meet quickly with the director of entertainment, to find out the content of the Ukrainian president's message and to find out "if it contains positions that could harm the company," says La Stampa.
They still have ten days to decide.