On Sunday and Monday the people of Avellino will be called to vote to choose who, between Antonio Gengaro and Laura Nargi, will wear the tricolor sash. Let’s say straight away that from our point of view the maneuvers of the last few days and the hidden agreements will have little or no impact on the outcome of the consultations. We are quite convinced that in the end the people of Avellino will decide with their own heads, one way or another. Because in the end it will be free and opinion-based voting that will move the needle, without prejudice to the fact that each of the contenders will mobilize all the army they have at their disposal.
One way or another it will end, there will be those who celebrate, in a more or less raucous way, and those who will have to swallow the bitter cup of defeat. What is certain is that this electoral campaign did not restore peace to the city and could not have, given the context, given the climate in which the confrontation took place. And this is a gigantic problem.
Soon, very soon, we will find ourselves dealing with the enormous issues that weigh on the present and future of the city and the real challenge, for whoever will be called upon to take charge of them, will be to transform those enormous issues into everyone’s problem, through the language of inclusion, overcoming the logic of friends and enemies, completely overturning the pattern of the last five years.
Whoever will be called to the bedside of Avellino will have the responsibility of determining the conditions for pacification, because only by putting an end to the tribal conflict that has marked the last five years, only by restoring its impartiality to the municipal institution, will the city be able to find the way back to a harmonious democratic coexistence. But these conditions will not be determined with the expectation of removing what has been, of erasing the past, but only with the effort of possible dialogue, of the necessary clash on the merits of the problems and solutions, only by putting an end to the permanent electoral campaign of the last five years.
It won’t be easy, regardless of what the outcome of the polls will be, and the loud tones of these weeks have nothing to do with it: the electoral campaign is the electoral campaign, the bitter clash is inevitable regardless of the context in which the dispute takes place plays. It has always been this way and will always be this way. Of course, today there are social networks, where groups of hating customers are hired to vomit manure, but in a few days those will return to where they are used to being, at the foot of some laid table ready to slaughter each other for a crumb, or in the shadow of anonymity .
The point is that once the elections have passed, it’s always time for politics. Even if politics isn’t there. Election campaigns are inevitably bloody, especially when the dispute is open. But once the electoral parenthesis is over, it will be up to politics to resolve the conflict and re-establish balance in representation. And from this point of view, the context in which we will move in the coming months until next year’s regional elections will not help.
Once the administrative hangover has passed, the race for repositioning will begin, internal games will open up within individual political forces and individual coalitions, but above all the fronts in the territories will be defined. The weight of all this will be unloaded firstly on the management level, in the service bodies, then on that of the political opposition, and will favor the further radicalization of the conflict in the capital city, the exploitation of every issue in an electoral key, a new trench warfare for the redefinition of the balance of power in the city and in the province.
It would be different if we could at least read the city and provincial political space using the same categories with which we read the national political space, it would be different if we could count on a recognisable centre-right and centre-left, because when the opposing identities are defined it is more It’s easy to recognize yourself in the conflict. However, when politics gives way to administrative civility, that is, when the contrast between defined identities disappears in the territories, it becomes complicated to recognize oneself in a common destiny and only the logic of contingent convenience remains which legitimizes a private vision of the institutions, a vision tribal of the democratic game.
Our hope is that in the aftermath of this electoral transition, politics can fully regain possession of its own primacy, that the coordinates of the city’s political geography, and therefore of the provincial one, can realign themselves with those of the national political geography, that in one way or in the other the long season of civility comes to an end, because only party politics, in a context of clear and functional alternation, can reconstruct the broken threads of our common destiny.
Ours is a sincere hope, regardless of who wins at the polls.
On the other hand, as long as we have the strength to be here we will always be in opposition. Always. Because this is what we were taught, this is what the free and independent press does. But that’s another story.
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