The fact that the idyll between the people of Lecce and Mayor Carlo Salvemini is declining can be breathed in the air to the point that the allies of the city government have long opposed his re-nomination for 2024. The approval ranking of the first citizens drawn up by Il Sole 24 Ore , which sees the tenant of Palazzo Carafa in the penultimate place, ahead of only the mayor of Potenza who closes the rankings, has only certified it. Attention, it is not that these classifications are particularly precise, indeed they are sometimes carried out with coarse criteria, but they certainly express a trend. There are many things that the people of Lecce did not like in this second term, starting with the management of mobility, the livability of the historic centre, the further degradation of the marinas, the cleanliness of the capital. Salvemini, to whom the citizens had given the keys to consensus after 20 years of center-right ends badly, very badly, has become ‘the one of cycle paths’ and ‘potholes as big as craters’ in urban streets. The voters’ falling in love is volatile, with a few beautiful words it is conquered, with some commonplace it is definitively lost. But if someone from the center right is easily seen returning to Palazzo Carafahe’s wrong, because these rankings have no effect on the electoral machine that will be set in motion in a few months. The disaffection of citizens who will not go to vote, the fragmentation of the centre-right coalition and the lack of credible alternatives, of weight and depth in the centre-left play in Salvemini’s favor who, just as homo novus was not eight years ago, is certainly not the Nero that the detractors describe.

‘Carlo what’s going on?’, Salvemini’s words

” Charles, what’s going on? Will you apply in 2024? ”. Mayor Salvemini had entrusted his vision of things to a post on facebook , when faced with the question of a hypothetical supporter, declaring himself available in the primaries and considering even stepping aside in the event of an improbable over-shared coalition candidacy.

“Immediately after the political elections, in 2022, I communicated my willingness to run again, to account for the work of the administration and because I consider it a political and institutional responsibility, at the end of a mandate that saw the cohesive council majority, net of episodes of physiological confrontation. After my announcement, I found that to some this decision seemed solitary or even imposed by Rome or Bari. It is therefore my duty to deal with the bad moods, which circulate more or less underground and – still in these days – are struggling to declare themselves openly . I communicated to the coalition that I do not intend to impose myself, but to propose myself. I don’t feel indispensable or irreplaceable, I don’t feel like a candidate regardless but only if there is full plural understanding.I personally believe in real primaries, organized to choose between real alternatives (if present, available, deemed valid for the challenge of actual elections), not to legitimize choices already made. OREvery alternative to my re-nomination is legitimate. Just as legitimate, I claim, my assessment of being the protagonist of any primaries. In which I could decide not to participate to leave the field free for new protagonists ready to take up the baton of an administrative political mandate that delivers us important results that will make the new Mayor’s task less tiring and complicated. Just as I don’t feel irreplaceable and not even ready to pass the baton to a new leadership, I feel fully entitled to govern until the end of my mandate. It is the most politically serious way I know of to serve the city to the end and it is the most credible way to be able to face together – leaders, political and civic forces, candidate councilors – the next elections head-on’.

The goals that Salvemini claims

‘A safe budget, a saved Lupiae, a public Sgm, an unprecedented public works plan, thanks to Pnrr and Cis, urban planning tools approved or in the process of being approved (Piano Coste, Pug, Pums, Documento del Trade); a 70% separate waste collection and an approved waste cycle closure project, a relationship between the Palazzo and the City based on rules, legality, transparency. And so on. All this and much more, despite the fact that we governed in pre-financial distress, in an organizational emergency with 300 fewer employees and went through a pandemic’.

For Salvemini, the balance sheet at the end of his mandate is more than positive and pits his strengths one by one. ‘ Objectives achieved, perhaps not claimed with sufficient force ‘ he argues, almost as if the problem of declining consensus is due to poor communication. What all those who do not give peace about the difference that exists between the commitment they put into it and the opinion of citizens say, a philosophically fallacious opinion, almost by definition. After all, the mayors often pay for the unshared work of some councillors, for whose action they are in any case politically responsible. Nor is it necessary to bring out, dear mayor, the category of gratitude: those who went up to Palazzo Carafa with you and who without you certainly would have seen the Palazzo di Città with binoculars, will not remember it in these days of your weakness . Indeed, often, the most stubborn doubters about his reconfirmation, the noisiest wavers, lurk among them. But that’s the policy.

And the centre-right?

The center-right currently has only one certainty, the weakness of the Mayor. But can this be the only programmatic connection point? Personalisms and crossed vetoes are the masters, even if Salvemini to close ranks paints his opponents as a war machine:

‘2024 will be an objectively difficult competition. We will measure ourselves against strong opponents who are very determined to win to close what they see as a parenthesis to be closed. In the name of an idea of ​​power that we know well. And of a political recovery that has the regional 2025 as its next objective.