People are voting again, and again without anyone having asked them to. After the poll that appeared on the Facebook group “San Marino Risponde,” the Instagram page Politica Sammarinese has launched its own consultation on the Association Agreement with the European Union: a blunt question — San Marino and the European Union: whose side are you on? — two options, yes or no, and two days to respond.
The post is here.
We are not publishing the partial results, and not out of diplomatic caution: the poll has only just started, the numbers right now mean nothing, and releasing them at this stage would only end up influencing those who have yet to vote. We’ll come back to it once it closes.
What can be said right away is that the audience is different.
San Marino’s Facebook groups are a familiar habitat, where people debate under their full names, carrying decades of personal history behind them. Instagram is a different crowd altogether, on average younger, one that engages very little with politics and almost never in a traceable way. If the two polls were to point in the same direction, the signal would become harder to dismiss as “the usual bunch of malcontents.” If they were to diverge, that would be even more interesting.
The comments have already produced the first unwitting assist: Councillor Gaetano Troina, of Domani Motus Liberi, joked that referendums aren’t held this way.
The page replied that, indeed, this isn’t a referendum — it’s a poll — and that a councillor ought to know the difference.
So yes, go ahead and vote. It carries no legal weight, no statistical value, and binds no one.
But the more people take part, the harder it becomes for anyone to argue that Sammarinese citizens have no opinion on Europe. It takes a minute, and no party membership card is required.
Sooner or later, someone will have to do this properly: a representative sample, a declared methodology, public results.
In the meantime, the country’s mood is being gauged by two social media posts. Better than nothing — and for now, it’s all we have.
