Politico: The sack of Rome’s mayor

Since taking office in 2016, the mayor of Rome has been unable to clean up the city’s filthy streets and make its badly maintained transport system work. Last month a tube station escalator collapsed, injuring 24, including one man who lost a foot. Almost no one is pleased with her work. [...]

According to the 5Stars’ code of ethics, a conviction of any kind would result in her resignation. Yet while her boss, 5Star leader and Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, and the movement’s founder, Beppe Grillo, don’t like Raggi, they also don’t want her to resign because they fear losing control of Rome to their coalition partner and chief political rival, the League. [...]

Before the 5Stars took over a major city for the first time, Rome was briefly governed by the center-left Democratic Party’s Ignazio Marino, and before that by the right-wing Gianni Alemanno. The latter is currently facing trial for corruption and Marino — who denounced the city’s systemic corruption to prosecutors, triggering the “Mafia Capitale” scandal — resigned over a restaurant expenses scandal.

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Political Critique: The Five Star Movement is at war with housing activists in Rome

Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome, has declared war on the movement for housing rights. At the end of August the Five Star Movement found a clear enemy, and to confront it they chose the hard-line. First they evicted an occupation at via Quintavalle, at Cinecittà. Then another at piazza Indipendenza in the very centre of the Rome, just next to Termini station. Today it is only the social movements and those participating in them who remain, erecting barricades in the attempt to defend the last migrants, fighting the battle against poverty and racism. [...]

And then another seemingly banal but in fact vitally important question posed by the movement for housing is: do single homeless people, men or women, have rights in the eyes of the local government? These questions need to be brought into the public debate. Speaking only of ‘fragility’ serves to fragment and divide the last bastions of struggle that continue to ask for serious definitive and systemic solutions; that push to escape the logic of ‘emergency.’ [...]

Today proposing real housing policy alongside measures tackling low income is not only difficult but politically inconvenient. Imagine an electoral campaign with social housing, minimum income, social inclusion, refugee accommodation at the centre proposed by a movement that comes from the web and, in particular, from social networks. Its electoral base would be immediately trashed by those who, on TV and other corners of the internet, wearing questionable hoodies, work to weaponise populism.

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