BARI – Vito Leccese, new mayor of Bari. Did he put the tricolor sash on the Laughing Sun?
«They are two symbols that go very well together. One represents democracy, freedom and rights, the other clean energy.”
What has changed when you returned to Palazzo di Città, where you worked for twenty years, as the newly elected mayor yesterday morning?
«The place is the same one I have been going through for twenty years. There are many more responsibilities. But I’m ready.”
The electoral campaign for the post-Decaro party had a genesis complicated by the division on the left. The first moment in which you developed the idea of committing yourself to this path?
«I have always been one step behind, or rather, to the side. And I had never really thought about being mayor. Then the situation in the center-left and in the Democratic Party became tangled, there was a risk of a dangerous free-for-all. And they asked me to apply to mend, to recompose. Well, at that moment I said to myself, “my turn has come”. Because mediation and temperance are qualities that have always been recognized in me, even when I did Socrates’ occupations or went to demonstrate in Avetrana against the nuclear power plant project.”
When did you have the perception that the dispute was taking a turn for the better for the centre-left?
«It was an electoral campaign that was, to say the least, “eventful” and I do not deny that with the heavy climate…
