To Naomo: There’s just no shame

by Don Domenico Bedin*

I allow myself, knowing that I will eventually have to pay the bill, to intervene in this electoral campaign for the renewal of the Ferrara municipal council.

Deputy Mayor Nicola Lodi returns with great determination and wealth of means. His strong point is his commitment to the surrounding areas and safety. His face in the “thousand” posters is peaceful and reassuring. But there is a political original sin that cannot be forgotten by the city.

When to win the elections he showed and shouted the slogan: “more rum less Roma” in a march towards Via delle Bonifiche where some Italian Sinte families were in the camp. Or when on the digger he destroyed the camps of newly transferred guests with contempt for their poor belongings. Perhaps the city does not know that the Sinti families, after various vicissitudes and discovering that they were Italian and from Ferrara, complete with an application for the assignment of public housing, were given a house by managing the rankings well. Couldn’t this have been done without humiliating them in that indecent and racist way?

And I can’t forget the picketing in Gorino against those refugee girls who ridiculed us throughout Italy. Even in Formignana one cold afternoon Naomo took a stand against the arrival of some refugees in a house managed by me. That day the boys were welcomed, thanks to him, by a police squad in riot gear…

In perspective, those violent and closed-off attitudes, all supported by the rest of the junta at least with silence, were politically foolish.

In recent days, agricultural business categories, together with artisans, restaurateurs and industrialists, have underlined the importance of the presence of immigrants in their companies and are relaunching the request for additional manpower. The refugees who have arrived in the province in recent years have almost always been distributed in the local hamlets (where Naomo loved to carry out raids) and the young people welcomed immediately find work. They are an important resource for the Ferrara economy. But the Municipality of Ferrara has not made even one property available, not even for Ukrainian refugees!

Restoring properties and fixing roads and monuments in depopulated hamlets without thinking that these places can only be places of life through a wise policy of welcome and integration is just short-sightedness and a waste of energy. Finally we learn that some representatives of the foreign communities of Ferrara are contacted by Naomo to join the League and they accept. It’s really nice to know that those who were rejected and considered a danger to Ferrara society are now considered a repository of useful votes to continue to govern against those who come from poverty and wars. There’s absolutely no shame!

*president of the Viale K association

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