The electoral campaign for the local administrations which, between 6 and 7 May, will call to the polls ends today, without particular jolts about 9 and a half million voters, spread over 945 Italian municipalities, including 26 provincial capitals.
The citizens who will vote will not, however, simply have to choose their own municipal administrators, but also provide, more or less indirectly, more or less consciously, an indication of the direction in which the political sentiment of the Italians is movingi, agitated by recent scandals, in what, de facto, is the first electoral test after the end (?) of Berlusconi and the start of the caretaker government led by Mario Monti.
Speaking of Berlusconi, his only outing within the electoral campaign is yesterday's story. During a rally in Monza the ex premier tried to minimize, pro domo sua, the political value of these elections. “Citizens – she declared – are wondering if it is still worth voting in a moment of parenthesis of democracy and with this provisional government”.
Therefore, in his words, his intention to diminish the importance of the result of these elections, which for the PDL does not promise to be particularly positive, and also to distance himself from the Monti government, is clear.
But this, in fact, seems to be a behavior common to almost all parties, which put a bad face on, so to speak, unloading the responsibility for the uncomfortable, but, alas, necessary, reforms on the technical government, in an attempt to keep its (im)popularity intact.
In the general framework of the administrations, however complex, a series of trends can be noted and analysed. Stands out above all the disintegration of traditional alignments, with the large coalitions which, in many municipalities, present themselves as uniforms and competitors, in a fratricidal struggle which, both on the right and on the left, risks displeasing everyone.
Also Bersani, which from a numerical point of view has less to lose (of the 26 provincial capitals to vote only 8 were administered by the centre-left), runs the risk to find himself having to rejoice in victories which could, however, seriously weaken his position. Both in Palermo, where there is also the unknown Orlando, and in Genoa, in fact, the candidate expressed by the primaries was not the one wanted by the top management.
The other significant aspect of the matter, as the Third Pole seeks its place in the world in the empty spaces, is the uncontrolled proliferation of civic lists, a further symptom of the disintegration of the historical parties, and of the ever-widening distance that separates some categories of citizens from traditional politics, which, to date, is increasingly useless, and which seems to have forgotten its original nature as an overview to organically inform a state, increasingly reducing itself to a dimension of mere sophistry.
And it is precisely riding, with its excesses of populism, this long wave that presents itself in the elections that announces itself as the real novelty in the Italian political scenario, Beppe Grillo's Movimento 5 stelle, credited by some polls with a 7% which could mean overtaking the League, awaited in the north at an important test bench on its stability after the scandals, as the third force among the Italian parties.
Genoa, Palermo, Verona, L'Aquila, awaiting its definitive reconstruction. These, and many others, will be the main tables of a match which, beyond Berlusconi's declarations, cannot and must not be politically reduced and from which the parties will inevitably have to draw some indications, if they want to survive the high tide.
