“Forlì is a city where people live well”. Thus begins a long open letter from Mayor Gianluca Zattini towards the elections. A letter between past, present and future of a city in which it is aiming for a second mandate.
The letter
“Forlì is a city where people live well. This is due to the industriousness of its citizens, the care of those who live and work there but also to the strategic choices made in the past by far-sighted and courageous administrators. Women and men who have put the interest of the community before that of the party, very often leveraging the decisive support of constructive and aware oppositions, fond of Forlì and its development. It was this unitary spirit that gave us the university, the Ridracoli dam, the hospital, the ring road, the technological-aeronautical hub and much more. An energy that, unfortunately, a certain left, now back in vogue, has repressed to the point of suffocation.
Giorgio Zannibonithis city’s longest-serving administrator, was at one point expelled from his party. Franco Rusticaliperhaps the most loved of Forlì’s mayors, a few years after the end of his second mandate he was taken to court, abandoned by his political heirs and humiliated as president of the airport. Nadia Masini – the first female mayor of the city – was repudiated by her party which subjected her to primaries against Roberto Balzani. Balzani himself – with whom I collaborated for a long time as mayor of Meldola – summarized his state of mind in a book with the laconic title “Five years of solitude”, without even putting himself forward for a second term. Davide Drei, with whom I shared strategic choices for the territory such as the birth of Alea, he was publicly reviled by his party, mocked and ultimately forced not to run again.
When I was elected in 2019, I found a city stuck on the track of memories of the great works of Satanassi, Zanniboni and Rusticali. Figures to whom, among other things, we have dedicated and will dedicate suitable spaces to make their memory perennial.
The disasters I think of when I turn to look at the last fifty years of this city’s history are the fruit of the selfishness of a left that has burned talents, mistreated, expelled and abandoned its best administrators. I am not referring, therefore, to the mayors of the past, to the people who in their role as administrators have done well, sometimes very well for our city, but to the at times despotic interference of PCI, DS and PD which, even today, are unable to have a healthy self-criticism. Since June 2019, just elected, I got to work to rekindle the engine of a sleeping Forlì, in need of new energy. This did not prevent me as mayor of the capital city from collaborating with the neighboring municipalities and the many mayors of different political colours. What matters for an administrator is to get things done. Carry out the projects that are needed (and also confirm and complete the right choices that come from the past, what harm is there?) and give a concrete response to the challenges of the next decade. Despite the pandemic and the flood – unprecedented events that no other mayor has had to face in the past – we have achieved a lot in the last five years, but much remains to be done and there are challenges (for example on infrastructure) that require an administrative cycle at least 10 years to be won. We thought and worked for the common good. We have put the city back in motion and now we want to move forward, to run.”
