The Youth Front: belonging, ideals and rebellion. The historic headquarters in via Vignes, a refuge for the restlessness and great aspirations of the young levers of the Lecce right. Fausto Caggia he was one of the leaders of those years between the roaring Eighties and the crisis of the Nineties, when rivers of political passion flowed through the corridors of high schools and then in the University, still not diluted by the solipsism of social media and «we rebelled against conformism , to bourgeois society, to that unbearable cloud that we felt over Lecce and on this it must be said the glances of understanding were more with the militants of the Fgci than with the party”. Today Caggia lives between Rome and Sicily: he is an associate professor of Civil Law and Comparative Law at the University of Enna. But he has never severed his ties with Lecce and with that right-wing population in which he still has long, very long-standing friends.
Professor in an analysis of the vote that sparked hundreds of reactions on Facebook, you wrote that the success of the new mayor, who lost around 3 thousand votes between the first and second rounds, “appears more like a sum of individual and corporate resentments more than the construction of a social bloc that is mobilized around a vision of the city and its policies”. Why do you consider Adriana Poli Bortone’s victory in Lecce “weak”?
«Because I believe we are now faced with a right that no longer sees or “feels” a city that has changed a lot in recent years. The monolithic bourgeois and conservative bloc of Lecce that we remember is now disjointed and there exists, in my opinion, a profound hiatus between the new multi-class and racialized Lecce society – and this right, which presented itself as united but harbors – within it – divisions and grudges. The seven years of Salvemini’s administration have produced a significant social transformation because the reconfiguration of urban space has redistributed powers and rights between social classes. Salvemini saw vulnerable urban subjectivities as cyclists, pedestrians, elderly people, immigrants, minors, giving them space and visibility in public space and this, if on the one hand it led to reactions “against” which the centre-right skilfully titillated during the election campaign, on the another convinced a significant portion of the Lecce middle class who are more open to change – to give up something, for example, the car park outside their house so that we could collectively take a step forward. It’s not a small advancement, in Lecce then.”
The result of the runoff gives us a city split in half. In this sense, what do you think are, from now on, the political responsibilities of Adriana Poli Bortone and Carlo Salvemini?
«The responsibilities are never just individual, but also collective. Having made this necessary premise, I believe that if the electoral victory was of the right, the political victory must undoubtedly be attributed to Salvemini: between the first and second round he practically lost almost nothing and his vision of the city also made inroads into that middle class and in the younger generations by convincing them to give up part of their habits. His main mistake was not seeing what he was building in some specific social environments, which, impoverished by the many crises, lined up in defense of the gains of social and economic positions. We will have to reflect on this and then start again by opposing not only in the classroom, but also in society, so as not to disperse the administrative heritage and consensus gained, a sprout from which to give birth to a new Lecce spring.”
And what do you expect from the new mayor?
«I fear that the more conservative bourgeoisie and the new economic powers in the city have no intention of taking prisoners and some first signs point in this direction. For Adriana Poli Bortone, a responsibility that goes beyond the institutional role: deciding whether to be Mayor of a part of the city which is not a majority in the urban area – or whether to read, with a non-electoral perspective, the seven years of Salvemini. We are at a decisive hairpin bend for the city and in the decisive hairpin bends we exchange water bottles, as in the photo between Bartali and Coppi on the Colle del Galibier”.
Professor, your discussion is very harsh towards those who once fought with you. What do they tell you today?
«I have progressively moved away from an increasingly economic declination of the concept of the right, which today is free-market, hyper-Atlantic, Westernist, custodian of a unilateral reading of global space and which thinks of resolving social inequalities and the climate crisis by relying solely on the logic of market. Some people today say they struggle to recognize me, but they have never looked to the depths of what I was and am, probably for fear of no longer being able to recognize themselves either. Ultimately, the question is: were we really right-wing in Via Vignes? It’s difficult to say, certainly some of us were never anti-communists.”
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