by Fabio Menin
Allow me to write my opinion on these municipal elections that saw the mayor triumph Flavio Stasi and the lists linked to him following two authoritative opinions expressed first by Lenin Montesanto and then from Matteo Lauria. If a person twice catalyzes the vote of the citizens with Bulgarian percentages, i.e. between 60 and 70%, it is not something that happens every day.
Lenin Montesanto is right in saying that in the voters’ identification with a leader such as Flavio Stasi, there is a sort of “man in command from the left” which reproduces the scheme of the man alone in command of a right-wing matrix, because the city’s electorate is certainly more similar to the right than to the left. There was a phrase that circulated among the populace before the votes and which I will tell you as I heard it: “Flavio Stasi is the Caputo of the left”.
This going after an alleged leader, i.e. a character who knows how to act as a leader as Flavio Stasi certainly does, is actually part of the popular cultural humus consolidated in at least 1000 years of history. The people here have always been used to following leaders, whether they were the lords of the past or the politicians of today, especially when these characters demonstrate a firm hand and clear ideas. Furthermore, relying on the abilities of an individual in a certain sense covers the void of current politics, where parties no longer exist so people are looking for a person to whom they can entrust their hopes. It’s a kind of semi-automatic psychological mechanism that clicks.
In fact, in the same ballot box we witnessed parties collecting thousands of votes in the European elections while in the municipal elections their percentages dropped by thousands of votes: it happened to the Brothers of Italy, the Democratic Party and also the Cinquestelle. The vote that counts in the municipal elections is on the people and the lists connected to them. But what merits does Stasi have to gain two thirds of the electorate? First of all, that of having governed in the difficult phase of the pandemic and the merger between the two cities by exercising ordinary administrative action that was not negative, nor in search of excessive favoritism and patronage. It has done some clientelism, but it is a small thing compared to the fact that it has also produced some improved roads, some districts with improved municipal services and an image of a character who loves – always at least in the image – to be close to the people in the best tradition of both dictators and populists.
It must also be said that the comparison with the rival played everything in its favor, where a right divided between too many “chickens of the henhouse” was unable to find a true synthesis in good time and the “poor” Straface was thrown into the last minute scrum with very few chances.
I would like to close this part of my analysis by saying that the city wanted to once again trust one of its sons, to someone he feels like his sona genuine expression of the city, hoping that it will continue and improve its administrative action, which in the first mandate was certainly weakened by a team surrounding him of people with their first political experiences.
I tell Matteo Lauria that the fact that 4 of his former councilors were not reconfirmed responds precisely to this logic: he necessarily had to rebuild a new team that enjoyed greater esteem in the electorate. But I have my sincere doubts that he really wants to pursue this path, we’ll see who he puts on the council, because personally I don’t see big differences between the outgoing city council and the current one (where the minority doesn’t have people capable of real opposition) if not that here in the majority out of 15 elected there are two councilors with proven culture and political experience, but all the others are merely an expression of vote collection through centers that manage professional studios, or patronages, or other forms of contact with citizens and not they certainly express centers of political culture, but of distribution of resources as unfortunately happens in this city, centers of welfare of various kinds.
Now the new union will have to manage the formation of the new hospital, the construction of the new road between Sibari and Corigliano, the question of railway electrification, the question of the court robbery and other regional or national dossiers that Stasi continues to act in solitude will hardly be able to bring in the most useful sense to the city and the territory.
And here I make a small personal aside. The mayor who is twice voted out in the city has all the numbers to compete for more ambitious political heights, for example political representation in the Italian Parliament, a position currently occupied by the right and by some 5-star representatives, positions that they are no longer able to obtain that little or nothing for the city or for the territory both due to political inconsistency and because in Italian politics there are rules that tend to penalize the south.
Now if Stasi does what Caputo did a few years ago or rather limits himself to being the city leader with a neo-Christian democratic mentality of pleasing a little here and a little there, it is a meteor that will have its own non-sensational conclusion; if instead he could make an effort to connect with the mayors of Cassano, Trebisacce and Mirto-Crosia to jointly address the shortages in transport, healthcare, structures serving tourism etc., which are problems of the territory and not just of Corigliano – Rossano then a new phase could be born.
The Schiavonea port dossier also remained open, and I would hope that a new phase would open where we would begin to look at the port as a vehicle to revitalize our commercial, agricultural and tourist economy and stop giving away our resources to foreigners.
So, to answer the question in the title: is the city starting to walk on its own two feet? In part yes because its new political history after the merger of the two former municipalities coincides with a liberation of old ties with the regional or provincial political and business cliques. But to be able to say that the city walks on its own two feet, some cultural requirements are needed which I think are missing for now: Here it’s not a question of intercepting more money from the meager state budgets or the larger EU budgets, but of deciding whether we want to really relaunch tourism, whether we want to create better structures for our agriculture, and whether we want to improve local transport structures today heavily penalized and those of healthcare.
To give an example: if citizens continue not to understand that it is in their interest and that of the city to have a clean city on the beaches, on the mountains, on the country roads, and if the administration does not make them understand this in some way, it means that they still don’t identify with the city itself, but only with their own small shop interests. That is, the image of the city that citizens, or at least a good part of citizens, have is not the image that can become a vehicle for development. So as long as this mentality remains, and it is not understood that a modern city has the duty to take care of its business card if it wants to grow, it will hardly grow.
So no mayor, whether Caputo or Stasi, will ever be able to revive the city’s destiny if we, the citizens, do not first want this thing and are willing to invest part of our resources for this purpose. In the more or less abandoned villages of Sila Greca, if you go you see super clean streets, flower-filled balconies, buildings looking for a bit of decorum. Why shouldn’t this also happen in Corigliano-Rossano? When this spirit can be born then the initiatives will no longer be individual, but cooperatives of people who want to get together to do something that improves for themselves and for the city and for the entire territory. Then we can say that Corigliano-Rossano walks on his own two feet because he wants to enhance what he already has and that he doesn’t have to ask anyone for anything.
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