The Cuneo council is creaking. Manassero: “I don’t accept being subject to blackmail”

Andrea Cascioli
04/29/2024 9.15pm

The internal tension within the centre-left – or rather centre-centre-left – coalition is at its highest level. Centro per Cuneo abandons work shortly before eight o’clock and leaves the explanation in a note: “Today’s discussion between the coalition groups on the CRC Foundation issue has generated a situation that requires urgent majority verification”. What is it about? Officially, in fact, the appointments to the board of directors of the banking foundation, which will be announced on Friday: the centrists want at all costs that the Cuneo office is covered by their coordinator Beppe Delfino, who is also president of Acda. This solution, it is rumored, does not displease the president in pectore at all Mauro Gola and its greatest political sponsor, Alberto Cirio. While those who were opposed to Federico Borgna in the race for the presidency of Palazzo Vitale he doesn’t want the former mayor, who left through the door, to come back through the window.

It is the most visible effect of the rapprochement of Action – the party of which Delfino and five of the seven centrist councilors belong, including the group leader Vincenzo Pellegrino – to the centre-right. An “extended coalition” that includes the president of the Province Luca Robaldo and his political inspiration Enrico Costa and which risks crushing, with its political weight, the current Cuneo administration. Manassero’s rebellious movement suggests that the mayor, this time, is not willing to bow her head in the name of government reason: it happened on the occasion of the vote on the biodigester, where the first citizen had first announced that Cuneo would follow Borgo, only to renege on this intention when it emerged that the Borgarine administration would have said no. That lightning tug of war between the Democratic Party and the Center was quickly put to rest, but this time it’s different.

Making conspiracy theories would be all too easy now. Judging by the reaction of the centre-right councilors to the centrist move, however, one might believe that if something had been preordained, the “pupari” who plotted against the mayor are not in Cuneo. A possible crisis of the centre-centre-left (which has governed Cuneo since 1995, excluding the “lone” parenthesis of Borgna I) and a large victory of the centre-right in the regional elections in June could pave the way for previously unimaginable scenarios. Where the Center could turn its head and look to its right, with the blessing of the leaders of Action and the other parties. There is at least one plausible candidate for mayor at hand, coming out of the CRC Foundation. Political fantasy? We will see.