The appointment is in front of the station, “but there is terrible traffic, I’ll be a little late”. Raffaele Giovine, 28, last year took 8 percent of the administrative votes by running for mayor on a left-wing civic list in Caserta and sits on the city council.
We eat a pizza in the center, after having a cold coffee to wait for a suitable hour for lunch. Why at his age he decided to go into politics is the first thing that comes to ask him. “I started in 2008 with The Student Wave, at the time of the education reform wanted by Minister Maria Stella Gelmini. Here in Caserta we immediately occupied a public space. We had in mind, without great reasoning, that public spaces should and could be used and usable. That experience changed us: all of us who did politics as students had big general ideas in mind, but somehow abstract. Working on the territory, politics has shifted to things to do “.
In 2016 Matteo Renzi, president of the council at the time, had visited the Royal Palace of Caserta. “The city was armored and the only authorized route for a demonstration passed through an abandoned public space, the Giaquinto house, a park that was closed because of vandalization and a shopping mall. We occupied it and tried to create a community which then became an association and began to think about how to ‘govern’ an occupied public space. How can a group of young people, old people, citizens manage a place for everyone? First the municipality gave us the keys, then we worked to try to imagine a shared administration, in which our experience was recognized and at the same time clear roles were assigned to citizens’ committees and institutions. Who does what “.
In this way, collaboration agreements between institutions and citizens were born, other groups were formed and other parks were recovered.
“The pandemic was another step. The groups that had occupied the parks and that through that common work had created community and participation, wondered how to convert their experience into solidarity for the neighborhoods they lived in. We founded the Caserta solidarity emergency committee: 150 volunteers brought home the shopping or did it for those who couldn’t, they looked for psychological help for those who needed it and other things like that. When the electoral campaign for the administrative elections of 2021 was about to begin, we asked ourselves if it was worth organizing to transform activism into participation in institutional politics ”. The civic movement Caserta decide was born with that goal: to give a voice, to make new pieces of civic activism decide, by bringing together committees, social centers, associations and that part of the institutional left outside the Democratic Party (Pd).
“We chose not to support the outgoing administration because, for example, we wanted an urban plan with zero land consumption, while the center-left did not have a plan but did not deny authorizations. And then, here in Caserta, the center-left is that of the model Vincenzo De Luca, the president of Campania, who has no problem nominating people from the center-right. At the heart of our campaign were the role of participation, the environmental challenge, the management of assets confiscated from the Camorra. The average age of the list was 34 and for this reason many young people voted for us, the environmentalists and, I think this is important, we got the same votes in the suburbs as in the center, in short, we were not seen as the so-called left LTZ “.
Jacket and shirt, Giovine does not look from the left Ztl or even a rebel, were it not for a small tattoo on the wrist with the lightning bolt that breaks the circle, very popular in social centers in the nineties.
“We are a movement born from below and from the opposition. This helps us not to lose our bearings. The role we are trying to play is to connect the low with the institutions: those who manage the parks, those who live in public housing and have made up their minds to be an energy community, those who live in the suburbs and are tired of how the its streets. The theme is not to create communities with those who are already with us, but with those places: accompanying the tenants of public housing who ask the Acer to be able to take advantage of the superbonus, supporting the battle for the area of the former Macrico, a space in the Caserta center owned by the Curia but managed by the ministry of defense. Being immersed in what happens prevents you from forgetting why someone elected you and what you are doing in the city council. It is not easy, you do not always achieve results, you are not always able, there are the limits of bureaucracy, the limits of the undersized municipal machine, personal and political limits. Here in Caserta there is a battle for the quality of living in the Acquaviva district, 20 thousand people, recent arrests for drug dealing. There we go to the condominium assemblies, to the street ones, we try to be there. When I applied, I thought I would deal with concrete things, but I did not imagine there were so many: if you are present, you become a referent “.
As we go from the bar to the pizzeria, two guys stop to talk about the problem of a water leak in the busy park next door. However, obtaining results is not at all obvious: how much do you count if you are an opposition council group? “Things must be done, we are not interested in fighting to show that we are right. In Acquaviva we need to renovate the houses and create an energy community to allow those who have difficulty paying their bills to produce energy. We are talking about this with the majority “.
The calm of the historic center, in a red-hot city from early summer, is not exactly what you expect from Caserta listening to the news. Today there is talk of a murder in the province and a violent nightlife. “You don’t answer by putting police cars and vans downtown. In the center in the evening the boys and girls who come from the small towns with great social degradation around here or from the popular districts, where there are no institutions, there are no gyms or spaces to meet ”.
Due to the covid, the educational gym represented by the public school was also lost for a couple of years. But the problem in these neighborhoods is not studying Ugo Foscolo’s poetry or learning how to calculate square roots via zoom. “There is no public policy that opens up spaces”, continues Giovine. “For the Acquaviva neighborhood, where they recently arrested six minors who were drug dealers, there is a plan called Quality of living that plans to build streets, does not regenerate abandoned spaces to make them available to the community, invests little money in the courtyards of the public housing or public parks. The difficult social context combined with the lack of institutional interventions generates fights and that culture of oppression, it is not that the minors have gone mad ”.
How does it feel to be elected to a municipality at 27 without having a structured party behind you? “A city councilor without a network is a bit lost. Take the things we talked about: the funds are national, the council houses of the regional body, the context and the local citizens. You who want to bring instances of the bass have no references, you have to build a ‘relationship bank’. A national leftist force, if it exists, should focus on the issue of the shit life that takes place in these suburban neighborhoods. There is an electorate sensitive to the issues of reconversion and social justice but I do not think there is an effort to organize it. What do I tell those who protest with me? What does something count within the city borders, but do I count for nothing outside? It is dramatic, the risk is that if in the suburbs we are not there to say ‘let’s open the parks and rebuild the houses’, the right will arrive to say ‘but what parks, we have to drive out the blacks who make noise and dirty’. But how long can this barbarism be curbed if a front is not built capable of representing unease and anger, offering answers instead of imaginary enemies? ”