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The place itself is a provocation. The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore with the Brunelleschi Dome is just a few steps away, a few meters in the other direction is the famous copy of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Here, in the center of Florence, in the heart of Tuscany, Italian Social Democrats have ruled for decades, proud of their city’s cultural heritage.
But this Friday night, the head of the Piazza della Repubblica Lega, Matteo Salvini, and his right-wing friends. Countless fans wave Italian flags over the square, right-wing extremists from the Identitarian Movement in black t-shirts distribute their propaganda when Salvini takes the stage at 6:51 pm, praising the beauty and culture of Tuscany and “the land of Michelangelo, Galileo “. and the Renaissance “wants to conquer.” Starting Monday, wait, his Lega will rule this country.
“Solving problems forgotten by the left”
Then Susanna Ceccardi takes the podium, the new shooting star of the Lega. The 33-year-old is running as the leading candidate in regional elections in Tuscany, and cleverly dispenses with the turmoil that Salvini has plagued the country in the past. “We are not barbarians,” she says about the right-wing mayors of Pisa, Siena and some other cities who are next to her on stage. “They only solved problems forgotten by the left.” And your opponent Eugenio Giani of the Social Democrats, a political official almost twice as old? “I sympathize with him”, says Ceccardi with a smile, “he would never allow me to defame him.”
If there are elections this Sunday and Monday, Ceccardi has a chance of winning the majority in Tuscany. In Italy it would be like a political earthquake, Tuscany is one of the last strongholds of the left in Italy; his downfall would be as sensational as the loss of power of the CSU in Bavaria.
Therefore, the government and the opposition in Rome are equally nervous. After the pandemic paralyzed the entire country and caused an economic crisis, now follows the first test of humor. A total of six regions are electing a new head of government and the prospects for Matteo Salvini and his right-wing allies look good.
If the polls are correct, the Lega should defend Liguria and Veneto and win Puglia and Marche. For the field on the left, only Campania is relatively safe, where the incumbent Vincenzo De Luca became popular during the running of the bulls with harsh comments against the celebrating students (“I’ll send you the flamethrower”). In short: the center-left government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte cannot afford a defeat in Tuscany.
It is one of the great enigmas of the year Corona 2020 why Conte is reaping so little political benefit from the crisis. His courageous management of the confinement made the independent law professor the most popular prime minister in Italy for 25 years. His coalition of the 5-star movement and the social democrat Partito Democratico (PD) enjoyed broad popular support at the height of the pandemic. And the European Reconstruction Fund became a personal triumph for Conte, securing his country an EU aid worth 207 billion euros, the largest financial injection in the history of Italy.
“We fight the extreme right”
One might hope that the prime minister, like Angela Merkel in Germany, will benefit from his sensible course, that citizens will honor the way his government keeps the number of infected people relatively low compared to Spain, France and many other countries.
But in the electoral campaign of recent weeks, the right-wing parties rose again. So far 13 of the 21 regions of the country govern, now two or three more can be added. How is this will to change explained? And why are the Social Democrats having a hard time even in their home country, one of the economically strongest regions in Italy, which coped with Covid-19 much better than the Lega-ruled provinces of Veneto and Lombardy?
Thursday noon in Viareggio, a Tuscan seaside resort near Pisa. It’s market day in Capponi-Allee, residents and tourists strolling past vegetable and cheese stalls as two older men, surrounded by television cameras, seek contact with voters. It is about Nicola Zingaretti, the head of the Italian Social Democrats, and their top candidate for Tuscany, Eugenio Giani.
“If I can make an appeal: defend this beautiful city. Save Tuscany,” says Zingaretti. After all, his party is not opposed to any center-right alliance as has happened so many times in history. “We are fighting the extreme right”, says the party leader, “I cannot believe that Tuscany should be ruled by politicians who use neo-fascist slogans.”
Salvini is happy with the new rosaries
It’s the same strategy that his Partito Democratico used to win regional elections in neighboring Emilia Romagna in January. Matteo Salvini’s fear and turmoil, his sometimes misanthropic and xenophobic slogans had mobilized countless people there. The party’s sardine movement filled the squares and campaigned for an open civil society. In the end, the right had no chance.
But the League has learned from it. Salvini is no longer as aggressive as he used to be, preferring to talk about the difficult start to school rather than the illegal immigrants. He, who likes to be the center of attention, even decided not to parachute over Arezzo as originally planned. Even he saw that the stunt would have stolen the show from his on-site candidate. And when an Afro-descendant woman tore the rosary from his neck and tore his shirt during the election campaign, he did not scold the foreigners, but kindly thanked them for the many new rosaries and t-shirts they had given him.
Eugenio Giani, the top candidate of the Social Democrats, on the other hand, looks like a Tuscan version of Joe Biden, he has always been there. He took up his first political office when his young Lega competitor Ceccardi was not even in kindergarten and is currently president of the Tuscan regional parliament. His hobbies, heraldry and medical history, seem remarkably dull, his views quite pragmatic and dry. He is not worried about Tuscany, which in his eyes surpasses almost all other regions of Italy with its prosperity. He is concerned about the national trend. “La Lega and its right-wing partners are currently in fashion throughout the country,” they benefited from social unrest in the rest of the country, Giani told SPIEGEL on the sidelines of his appearance in Viareggio.
“We are going back to the Middle Ages”
He wants to insulate his homeland from this trend as much as possible. Salvini will leave after the elections, predicts the historian, who is also president of the Casa Dante museum in Florence. But if his young governor wins, he fears that relations with Europe will be destroyed. “Then Tuscany will move in a completely different direction.” A few days ago, Enrico Letta, Italy’s left-wing prime minister from 2013 to 2014, put it in a similar way. “Our government is not with Budapest and Warsaw, but with Berlin and Paris,” he said in an interview about the time after Salvini lost power a year ago. “We switched from Orban to Merkel.”
A 17-year-old student, his name is Alessio, approaches Giani in Viareggio. The two walk a few hundred meters through a park and talk. Most of his contemporaries don’t know what the Social Democrats stand for, Alessio says after the conversation. “The party has strayed too far from the young.” If he were allowed to vote, he would vote for the Social Democrats. But he doesn’t like the Lega candidate much, Ceccardi, either. “It seems genuinely correct, and it speaks to us guys in very clear terms.”
“Nightmare Tuscany” was the headline of Italian newspapers, and the Partito Democratico was threatened with “Armageddon.” Most on the left believe they can do it all again. But they need fear of danger from the right to mobilize their voters. “If Ceccardi wins, we will go back to the Middle Ages,” a Rome PD minister warned about the Lega candidate during the election campaign. “She is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said the mayor of Florence. In Prato, a suburb of Florence, she fought against the new bike lanes because they were only used by immigrants. Now it is about showing the true face of the Lega: “intolerant, discriminatory, anti-European”.
The stakes are high for both parties. Matteo Salvini wants to regain interpretive sovereignty in the country after he was marginalized during the shutdown and Prime Minister Conte set the agenda as a crisis manager. And Conte’s coalition must finally turn its successes in crown politics into political capital, which is particularly difficult for the 5-star movement: in most regions, the stars are not ready to enter an electoral alliance. with his government partner in Rome. He runs his own candidates and thereby weakens his own government.
And Susanna Ceccardi? Salvini’s main candidate tries to calm things down. On the stage in Florence, she talks about health care, transportation policy; Avoid attacks against Europe or migrants. Instead, the 33-year-old prefers to criticize the supposed nepotism in the region. “Those who roll up their sleeves must be rewarded,” he exclaims to the cheers of the fans, “and not those who just have the right party book.”
Otherwise, the lawyer relies on her experience in Cascina, a Tuscan coastal city ruled by LInken for decades, where she won the mayoralty in 2016. Now the others have made the same mistake as then, Ceccardi said in an interview with “La Repubblica “:” Demonization doesn’t work for me. “
