I am happy, and I say this without irony, that the candidate Anselmo had a fulfilling human experience. It’s not easy to question yourself in an electoral campaign, especially in this city.
However, I have a perception that is distant from the breath of fresh air being described. The election campaign seemed angry to me, with little politics and many personal attacks.
The atmosphere in the city was and still is terrible, mistrust and mutual closure are the legacy.
But it is not the emotional register that helps us understand the political dynamics that underlie an electoral result that for the left is an unprecedented disaster. We’re talking about the worst defeat since the Republic existed.
We are talking about a crash far beyond the one suffered by Modenesi five years ago, which moreover came following a series of democratic forcings which would be appropriate to account for.
In 2023, the most sacred moment of a party’s internal democracy, the election of the secretary, was reduced to a procedural fiction: there was only one candidate admitted (I was a member of the Democratic Party – and I will return when I can vote between at least two candidates).
A nomination, therefore not an election. A wound to heal.
The choice of the mayoral candidate was also another nomination, in which it was immediately clear that there was little time for discussion, and dissent was poorly tolerated. After four and a half years of hibernation everything had to be decided without hindrance and without discussions.
There would also be a discussion on the merits of an electoral campaign managed like an interminable criminal trial, with communication to citizens reduced to an exhausting presentation of “evidence” against Fabbri. How the belief developed that nailing the mayor to the role of accused to be condemned (politically) could produce consensus remains inexplicable.
The result that a campaign experienced like a western duel would produce was clear well before the terrible electoral crash.
Moreover.
I fear that the judgment did not go so much to Fabbri, with the few strengths and weaknesses he has, but to the shouted and angry way of speaking to citizens chosen by the left.
It is clear to everyone that the seeds of anger and social discord were planted by Naomo and his associates for years and years, but that they should germinate in the garden of the left is a success that not even he expected.
