Last day to decide on ties. Only a few hours to regroup the opposition in view of the second round of the local elections which took place on 8 and 9 June. In a week there will be a run-off in around 100 cities. In Florence there is an agreement between the Pd and M5s. Elsewhere, however, the road appears a little more uphill. In Cremona, for example, the Five Star Movement opted for an amarcord of Grillina rhetoric: neither with the right nor with the left.
This is the substance of the verdict given by the local leaders after a week of consultations with the two candidates remaining in the game: Alessandro Portoghesi, supported by the centre-right, and Andrea Virgilio, supported by the Pd and Avs. “The positions of the parties remain distant and the openings of both candidates do not offer sufficient guarantees”, said in a note the third-placed candidate Paola Tacchini, whose 5.3 percent obtained a week ago could be decisive in a possible head-to-head. The political reflection, however, is on the obstinacy of a five-star party in repudiating not so much the alliances in general, but the equality of the right and the left which with the new Contian course – declared progressive – seemed definitively archived.
This is evidently not the case. And it is no coincidence that Cremona is precisely the city of an irreducible old-style Grillismo: Danilo Toninelli, benched by the automatic nature of the two-term rule. The former minister, now on his way to a career as a 5-star TikToker, prefers not to comment: “Absolutely, I don’t do interviews”. Yet just a week ago he decided to come out into the open to criticize none other than the president of his party, the guilty – he implied – of the electoral defeat which arrived with a disappointing 9.99%, to say the least. “Conte is a technician – commented Toninelli on Radio Cusano -. You have to have the courage to say that he’s a good person, but technicians don’t have the ability to excite”. The problem, according to Toninelli, is that Beppe Grillo is missing: “He made us dream”, he said before indulging in a nostalgic memory of the old days, when “we said concretely we are neither right nor left” and “we united people beyond political ideologies”.
This explains the Cremona model. Toninelli is not the only one to hope for a return to the past led by Grillo. Furthermore, the guarantor went to Rome in recent days to meet the current five-star leaders – Conte first and foremost – and even the exponents marginalized by the new course. Personalities such as Virginia Raggi (ever closer to Alessandro Di Battista) and Alessio Villarosa, former undersecretary expelled in 2021. But Conte has now taken a different path than the one hoped for by the old glories. A path that could be strengthened in light of the European defeat and thanks to the end of the electoral campaign carried out in a proportional perspective. In Florence, for example, the line on alliances seems more flexible than that chosen in Cremona: “The right field can only be built with the Democrats and in the run-off we will convincingly support Sara Funaro’s candidacy”, Lorenzo Masi said. 5s candidate in the first round. On a national level, however, on Tuesday the opposition will meet in Piazza Santi Apostoli for the demonstration against the government, sparked by last Tuesday’s fistfight in the Chamber. There will be Elly Schlein, Riccardo Magi, Bonelli, Fratoianni and also Giuseppe Conte. “We cannot remain indifferent to these attempts to compromise Italy’s democratic principles,” the Five Star Movement wrote in the call to arms. A choice that is not widely accepted in some areas. Definitely not in Cremona.
