He had called Roberto Vannacci an "idiot". The Court of Ravenna acquitted Pier Luigi Bersani of the accusation of having defamed the general, later elected MEP with the League, with the definition uttered during an interview from the stage of the Festa dell'Unità in Ravenna on September 1, 2023.
The acquittal was pronounced "because the fact does not exist". On the issue, after Vannacci's complaint, on February 27 the Ravenna Prosecutor's Office had requested a criminal conviction decree for Bersani for a 450 euro fine for defamation aggravated by the medium (in addition to being broadcast in front of hundreds of people, the interview had been broadcast live streaming on the YouTube channel of the Democratic Party), as "the criminal responsibility could be said to be proven on the basis of the audio-video documentation" acquired by the Ravenna Digos.
The investigating judge Corrado Schiaretti, after a legal and grammatical examination, concluded that the request of the PM cannot be "accepted due to its legal and even linguistic non-existence". In particular, Bersani, in relation to Vannacci's bestseller "Il mondo al contrario", had set his reasoning in a hypothetical "Italian bar" and, interviewed by a journalist, had asked this question: "But if in that bar it is possible to call a homosexual abnormal, is it also possible to call a general an idiot?". Specifically, according to the judge, Bersani's words "cannot be classified as metaphorical", but rather it happened that "the plaintiff confused the figure of the metaphor with that of the allegory".
That is, Bersani "describes a non-existent place where languages in stark contrast with civil sensibility would be permitted". It is evident that, "given the personal history and the irony that Bersani has displayed in decades of political career, the incriminating phrase does not appear credible to the listener: a rhetorical device aimed at political irony towards the Italian right".
Ultimately , the former PD secretary had "wanted to highlight that, just as it is wrong to call a homosexual abnormal, it is equally wrong to call a general an idiot."
(Online Union)
