I’m an Italian student living in the U.S. for less than a year so far, and this is my first time experiencing the presidential election and campaign.

From Italy, where I’ve always been living until recently, I was receiving only the echo of this important event, usually covered up by events of the local politics.

I followed a lot of Italian elections and year after year I grew skeptical of politics. I thought it was always basically the same situation, a different government would be elected but nothing would actually really change. People kept on lamenting about politicians, and politicians kept on being stereotypes of themselves. Italy has been for dozens of years politically unstable. Governments usually don’t even last more than a year, and the Parliament very rarely is able to keep a stable majority for the full five years of mandate set by the Constitution.

What I’m going to say are just my opinions. I’m sure they might sound far from being true for many people, but please forgive me as I am really not an expert in politics. I’m just sharing my ideas about the controversial topic known as politics.

Well, I always thought the U.S. was very different from Italy. I was accustomed to thinking about it as the home of the perfect democracy, where the two main parties (Republican and Democratic) alternate each other pretty regularly both in the Government and in the Parliament. As it is, it seems the best solution for the whole population to benefit from.

Anyways, I had to reconsider my position while I was asking and hearing about the present presidential election, trying to give myself a better idea of the candidates and of the great, inspiring, leading, American politics.

So I found out that if I thought that Italian politics was sometimes very close to a joke, probably the American one is even worse. In fact, here politics is, first of all, a business. When I heard about the first poll vote in a state I thought we were done with elections. I took so long to realize that every state has polls at different times, and the only reason I can find for not just having one single day for all the states is just economical and advertising. But, isn’t politics supposed to be about making the state better, not yourself famous?

Also, politics here is a real show. Obama’s final speech was touchy but very close to a comedy talk (and this is actually why so many people were watching it, because I’m sure that if it was more serious it would have had less shares on social networks). Trump’s Facebook’s posts are ridiculous. And I actually have to put the American respected politicians on the same level together with the Italian ones that I (not alone) have been making fun of for a long time.