PARMA. The city of Parma chooses the center left. The winner of the ballot is Michele Guerra, who has trimmed a resounding defeat to Pietro Vignali, a candidate of the center-right. Forty-year-old, professor of film history, with speeches at Stanford and the Sorbonne, former councilor for culture of the outgoing mayor, Pizzarotti, led to the triumph a coalition of civics and progressives that had the Democratic Party as leader. Guerra got about 66% of the votes, doubling the challenger.
In the words spoken shortly after the polling stations closed, which registered an extraordinarily low turnout (37%), the sixty-second mayor of the ducal city inaugurated the five-year mandate that awaits him, saying: “This is a historic moment for Parma is a great result of a new, cohesive political project that will not disappoint ».
During the election campaign, Guerra presented a program focused on welfare policies: the elderly, social pact, housing, food income, health care, cycle paths and more street cleaners. Then, he relied on the less noble past of his challenger, recalling the 2-year sentence for embezzlement negotiated in 2015 by Vignali, as a symbolic episode of bad governance, indebtedness and crazy expenses that characterized the years in which the city was held precisely by this ‘last.
The most prominent personalities of the Italian center-left, above all, the secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta, and the honorable and leader of Articolo Uno, Pierluigi Bersani. Full continuity also with the administration of the outgoing Federico Pizzarotti, who on the other hand had wanted Guerra in his own council. Pupillo of Beppe Grillo, elected in 2012 as the first mayor of a provincial capital of the 5 Star Movement, Pizzarotti had then released himself and was able to obtain a second mandate with his own civic list, but never joined the Democratic Party.
In the defeat of the center-right, the choice of a candidate emerges who has not been able to regain the trust of the voters, despite the seven years spent by Vignali to rehabilitate his image and access to the fight that emerged in extremis in the first round of 12 June. Strongly wanted by Berlusconi, the one that the Parma people called the mayor of nightlife, because as a young man he had been a PR, he got only lukewarm support from the League, while the Brothers of Italy ran their own candidate. The return of the Democratic Party at the helm of the city, albeit in a coalition, mirrors the disappearance of the 5 Star Movement, which this year was unable to present any list on what had been the field of one of its first and most brilliant victories.