What happens in the center-right between administrative and referendum
Paola Sacchi's note
Matteo Salvini restarts from Umbria, ex-deep red, the Northern League-led Region with Donatella Tesei who three years ago broke the yellow-red alliance by more than 20 percent. “From here the change started. Here we govern many important municipalities with the center-right, of which the League is the driving force. They would have given us crazy if a few years earlier we had only hypothesized such an undertaking ”, the League leader proudly claims on the treasure chest of Todi, set in the splendor of the historic buildings. He came here to support the re-nomination of the mayor Antonino Ruggiano. With him the Northern League senator of Terni Valeria Alessandrini who also accompanies him to Narni, famous for the photo of the Pd leaders (Zingaretti instead of Letta) and Cinque Stelle with Conte and Di Maio – which symbolized the defeat of the yellow-red alliance at Region – but still governed by a Pd mayor whom the League with the center-right opposes another female candidacy, Cecilia Cari.
The former "red fort", the green heart of Italy, conquered in 2019, governed by the center-right in the capital Perugia with a mayor of Forza Italia, Andrea Romizi, and in the other provincial capital Terni by a Northern League mayor, Leonardo Latini, it is the ideal starting point, more tonic for Salvini, in the final stages of a difficult electoral campaign for the Administrations and for the five Yes in the referendum on justice, Sunday 12 June. These were days marked by strong controversy, "a massacre on the part of the left against me", he says, for the hypothesis of the visit to Moscow.
The "captain" – also struggling with the strong internal competition in the coalition of Giorgia Meloni, president of FdI who sails in the polls – before the meeting and the usual selfie bath, relaxes on the chest square of the Umbrian town where they stop to talk with him also groups of children on a school trip. “After all, I now feel half Umbrian”, Salvini jokes relaxed in the Zen version, who does not pick up on attacks and insults that have come to him in recent days. From the peace for Ukraine to the fiscal one with the scrapping of tax bills, to the economic and social crisis aggravated by the war, with the stratospheric rise in bills and gasoline, Salvini beats all the keys. He claims his meetings made public, he recalls, "by the same press agencies" with all ambassadors, including the Russian one, "who should we ask for a ceasefire if not the Russia he attacked?". It is the script of all the rallies that from Narni and Todi wind their way north to Lucca until late yesterday evening.
And also in Tuscany, as he had already done in Umbria, he contrasts the left with Zen tones: “We have opposite visions, but I do not say that mine is superior. In Lucca we are fighting to snatch the municipality from the left, but this does not mean that we must disrespect the history of this splendid city ”, warns the large crowd. In Narni he had already pointed out how difficult it is to govern with a left with which he clearly excludes in 2023 going to reissues of broad understandings, which he accepted, to the detriment of consensus, because "we put the interest of the country before that of the party ”, something that he often repeats and sounds addressed to FdI.
And in the evening, at the end of a tour that today will concentrate everything in the North, the former Minister of the Interior is satisfied with a sigh of relief for the backtracking of the government on the masks at the polling stations for the Administrations and throughout Italy for the referendums, which from mandatory have become recommended, after recourse to the TAR of the League. One less obstacle for that "gag put in the referendums by TV, left-wing journalists, left-wing magistrates against a historic opportunity to change justice", Salvini denounces, together with the fact that "incredibly only one day was given, only one Sunday for a referendum ". The same thing also denounced by Silvio Berlusconi who appealed for the five Yes.
The denunciation of the silence on the referendums was also made by Meloni, who is for three Yeses. But at the meeting of the FdI leader in Viterbo, one of the cities where the center-right will be divided, written with the Yes referendums do not stand out as in the League's appointments. Salvini has announced that he will be on the stage in Verona to support the candidate Federico Sboarina of FdI with Meloni. It will be enough to appease the controversies that re-exploded the day before yesterday and to heal the wounds of a coalition at the head of all the polls but shaken by an internal leadership struggle that recalls those to the left of the times of the Olive Tree or the Union of prodian memory, despite Salvini said that whoever gets the most votes will be the prime ministerial candidate?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/centrodestra-amministrative-umbria/ on Thu, 09 Jun 2022 05:36:47 +0000.