Two Palestinian students have arrived in San Marino. In the perception of many, an exodus has arrived.
In between there is no new fact — there is a narrative. And this gap between reality and perception is today the country’s real political problem, far more than any dossier sitting on the government’s desk.
Try the experiment at a bar.
Ask how many Palestinians live on the Titano today. The answers you’ll hear range from “about a hundred” to “families are on their way,” with someone swearing they know of houses already assigned. The real answer is two.
Two young people from Gaza studying Design, sleeping in Caritas-provided accommodation and taking the bus to class. Bringing them here took almost a year of paperwork, visas and checks.
Perception doesn’t come from nowhere.
It comes from headlines that suggest without stating, from a “there is talk of” that becomes “it’s on the way,” from a possibility mentioned in Commission that two steps later is already treated as a certainty. Nobody lies outright. The work is done through adjectives, omissions, repetition.
A story repeated ten times doesn’t become more true — it becomes more believed. And whoever repeats it knows this perfectly well.
The mechanism works because it costs little and pays off a lot.
Fear drives clicks, outrage drives shares, precision is boring.
Verifying a number takes a phone call; inflating it takes only a headline. In a country of thirty thousand people, where many read the headline and stop there, the headline becomes reality. Everything else is a detail that almost no one reads.
Everyone pays the price.
The two young people pay it, turned into a symbol of something they are not. Those opposed to reception policies pay it, because they end up arguing against a phantom instead of an actual decision. Those in favour pay it too, forced to defend themselves against accusations that have no real object.
And public debate pays the price, ceasing to be an exchange of opinions and becoming instead a clash between perceptions manufactured from thin air.
One can be against anything. One cannot be against the wrong numbers.
A mature community discusses how much it wants to welcome, under what controls, and at what cost.
It does so starting from what actually happened, not from what someone needs it to look like has happened. The day we accept that perception is worth as much as reality, we hand our decisions over to whoever writes the loudest headline.
That’s why Insider did the least spectacular thing possible: it asked.
We called the competent Secretary of State, lined up the facts, and checked them against the public record.
The result is a far less exciting story than the one circulating. It is also the only true one.
We will keep doing this.
Not because the truth sells better, but because a small country cannot afford to live in a reality that doesn’t exist.
