by ALDO BELLI – The Andrea Buscemi case. Guilty to have been acquitted. Funaro ousts him. Who are the shadows behind Funaro?
The Buscemi affair was hastily set aside. Perhaps because they are all focused on the historic significance of the elections: the possible loss of Palazzo Vecchio for the left. Incidentally, this alone can push Florentine voters fond of the communist tradition (and it is not an offense) to vote Sara Funaro mayor. The caliber of her opponent, Eike Schmidt, former director of the Uffizi Galleries, is objectively more prestigious. Funaro was “councilor” (strictly written, in the city of Dante, with the letter ‘a’ at the end) for Welfare and Healthcare, Housing, Equal Opportunities, Reception and Integration and then also Public Education. Commendable commitment, but a bit of an experience for the international dimension of a world capital like Florence.
Funaro presents herself as a candidate for mayor of the centre-left saying: “I would like Florence to be more and more the city of tolerance and respect”. A month later, on May 14, the actor and director Andrea Buscemi was named the leader of the The center in support of Funaro. Twenty-four hours and he’s out: “My sensitivity – explains Sara Funaro – for issues such as equal opportunities, women’s rights and the fight against all forms of violence lead me to state that the presence of the actor Andrea Buscemi, whose story I did not know, in the Center’s list is not appropriate: I have read that he was acquitted in the legal case that involved him, but there cannot be any shadow on these issues that would risk giving a misleading message: his candidacy must therefore be withdrawn and he cannot participate in our electoral campaign. I have always been close to the battles of women and the associations that work in the area alongside them every day.”
Andrea Buscemi, in the context of a romantic relationship, he had been accused of stalking. In January 2016, the Court of Pisa acquitted him after three years of trial because the fact did not constitute a crime. He goes back and forth between the tribunal, the court of appeal and the court of cassation. He was then also acquitted of the charge of having influenced a witness, then dismissed by the investigating judge on the defamation charge. “I read that he was acquitted in the legal case... but there can be no shadows on these issues” says Funaro herself. And this is the political point that goes beyond Buscemi’s personal story.
To govern Florence, before the Law, before the Sentences and the Constitution of the Republic, they will be there “tolerance” and the “respect”but in the Funaro version: the Government of Shadows.
The candor of the mayoral candidate and that invocation to the “not an opportunity” typical theorem of the purge that germinated on the banks of the Don and in the sacristies of the whitewashed tombs, has not done a good service to the secular and transparent image of the center-left: unless Funaro now tells the Florentine voters what “shadows” we are talking about. Do not leave any doubts unanswered that the speed of the decision with which it ousted and silenced a free citizen who was a candidate for the elections, twenty-four hours ago, was the result of a panic attack following political blackmail: Florence does not deserve a mayor who is powerless to lobbies . You have not done a good service even to the “women’s battles”: because personal persecutions do not belong to the history of the Italian women’s movement.
Better to be clear sooner than later. It would be a real shame, and not only for Florence, to find ourselves in Palazzo Vecchio which, instead of looking to the example of grandfather Piero Bargellini, the great mayor of the 1966 flood, followed in the footsteps of the fires in Piazza della Signoria.
(photo: pxhere license – https://pxhere.com/it/photo/1349503)
