Bari remains on the left. With all due respect to those who thought that the alarm about infiltrations in the Municipality launched by the anti-mafia prosecutor could distrust Antonio Decaro’s Democratic Party. It was understood already in the first round, when the outgoing mayor put the one-way ticket towards Strasbourg in his pocket with over 500 thousand votes, leaving his seat to his friend the dem Vito Leccese, thanks to the Grillino support that he earned 22 seats out of 30 and 70.27% of the votes (around 72 thousand) against 30 thousand (and seven seats) for Fabio Romito of the centre-right.
The Apulian governor Michele Emiliano, undisputed dominus of Puglia for 20 years now, laughs under his beard. The low turnout – just over one in three voters voted – signals the city’s great malaise and a centre-right evidently incapable of interpreting it in the best possible way. «The case of the Ligurian governor Giovanni Toti has shifted the attention of the newspapers from the shadows of the mafia to Puglia», says one of the center-right’s trumped candidates with the microphones turned off. “Is it a coincidence that Genoa’s chief prosecutor Nicola Piacente, who had Toti arrested, worked side by side with Emiliano in Brindisi a few years ago?”, insists the source. Election campaign malice, sure. But the climate that reigns in the city is not that of a plebiscite, on the contrary.
Under the ashes of the legal troubles that have engulfed the Municipality and the Region, some news is hatching. There is the access commission which is trying to understand the seriousness of the possible infiltration of the Capriati mafia family into the municipal transport company Amtab in Bari («considered the employment office of the bosses» according to the Prosecutor’s Office), there are the clumsy sentences of Emiliano on his then young councilor Decaro “entrusted” to one of the sisters of the mafia boss Capriati to protect him (from who?), stammerings from the sen escaped on which the former prosecutor reported to the Anti-Mafia commission but only when he wanted, that is, after the painful reshuffle in the Region.
In fact, he is also worried about the investigations into his magic circle, from Sandro Cataldo to his wife Anita Maurodinoia (accused of criminal association aimed at electoral corruption for having bought votes for 50 euros each) not to mention the former municipal councilor Alessandro D ‘Adamo, under investigation for an alleged scam on EU training funds, up to Alfonsino Pisicchio, of whom Emiliano knew the sad judicial fate that would have had him arrested, so much so that he warned him via WhatsApp that it was time to leave his position as a sub-government which he occupied.
Who knows, sooner or later the Prosecutor’s Office will hear from Emiliano to understand the identity of the mole who stole him from him. But now the die has been cast, the city is still his fiefdom. And Elly Schlein is evidently fine with that.
