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Lega boss Salvini, top candidate Ceccardi on Friday in Florence: win the "Land of Michelangelo, Galileo and the Renaissance"
Photo: CARLO BRESSAN / AFP
The place itself is a provocation.
The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore with the Brunelleschi Dome is only a few steps away, a few meters in the other direction is the famous copy of David by Michelangelo in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Here, in the center of Florence, in the heart of Tuscany, Italian Social Democrats have ruled for decades, proud of their city's cultural heritage.
But this Friday evening, the Piazza della Repubblica Lega boss Matteo Salvini and his right-wing friends.
Countless fans wave Italian flags over the square, right-wing extremists of the Identitarian Movement in black T-shirts distribute their propaganda when Salvini takes the stage at 6:51 p.m., raves about the beauty and culture of Tuscany and "the land of Michelangelo, Galileo." and the Renaissance "wants to win over.
From Monday, he hopes, his Lega will rule this country.
"Solving Problems Forgotten by the Left"
Then Susanna Ceccardi climbs onto the podium, the Lega's new shooting star.
The 33-year-old is running as the top candidate in the regional elections in Tuscany, and she cleverly dispenses with the agitation with which Salvini whipped up the country in the past.
"We are not barbarians," she says of the right-wing mayors of Pisa, Siena and a few other cities who stand next to her on the stage.
"They only solved problems forgotten by the left."
And your opponent Eugenio Giani from the Social Democrats, a political functionary almost twice as old?
"I sympathize with him," says Ceccardi with a smile, "I would never allow myself to defame him."
If there is an election this Sunday and Monday, Ceccardi has a chance of winning the majority in Tuscany.
In Italy it would be like a political earthquake, Tuscany is one of the last left-wing strongholds in Italy - its fall would be as sensational as the loss of power of the CSU in Bavaria.
The government and opposition in Rome are therefore correspondingly nervous.
After the pandemic had paralyzed the whole country and provoked an economic crash, the first mood test is now following.
A total of six regions are electing a new head of government, and the prospects for Matteo Salvini and his right-wing allies seem good.
If the polls are correct, the Lega should defend Liguria and Veneto and gain Puglia and the Marche.
For the left-wing camp, only Campania is relatively safe, where incumbent Vincenzo De Luca became popular during the lockdown with harsh comments against celebrating students ("I'll send you the flamethrower").
In short: the center-left government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte cannot actually afford a defeat in Tuscany.
It is one of the great puzzles in the Corona year 2020 why Conte is currently drawing so little political benefit from the crisis.
His courageous lockdown management made the independent law professor the most popular prime minister in Italy for 25 years.
His coalition of the 5-star movement and the social democratic Partito Democratico (PD) enjoyed broad popular support at the height of the pandemic.
And the European Reconstruction Fund became a personal triumph for Conte, it secured his country EU aid amounting to 207 billion euros - the largest financial injection in Italian history.
"We fight against the extreme right"
One could expect that the prime minister - like Angela Merkel in Germany - would benefit from his level-headed course, that the citizens would honor the way his government keeps the number of infected people relatively low compared to Spain, France and many other countries.
But in the election campaign of the past few weeks, the right-wing parties rose again.
So far they rule 13 of 21 regions in the country, now two or three more may be added.
How is this willingness to change to be explained?
And why are the Social Democrats having a hard time even in their home country, one of the economically strongest regions in Italy, which coped with Covid-19 much better than the Lega-ruled provinces of Veneto and Lombardy?
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Eugenio Giani: The Tuscan version of Joe Biden
Photo: NurPhoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Thursday noon in Viareggio, a Tuscan seaside resort near Pisa.
It is market day on Capponi-Allee, residents and tourists stroll between vegetable and cheese stalls when two older men, surrounded by television cameras, seek contact with voters.
They are Nicola Zingaretti, the head of the Italian Social Democrats, and his top candidate for Tuscany, Eugenio Giani.
"If I may make an appeal: Defend this beautiful city. Save Tuscany," says Zingaretti.
After all, his party is not opposing any center-right alliance, as has so often happened in history.
"We are fighting against the extreme right," says the party leader, "I can't believe that Tuscany should be ruled by politicians who use neo-fascist slogans."
Salvini is happy about new rosaries
It's the same strategy that his Partito Democratico used to win the regional election in neighboring Emilia Romagna in January.
The fear of Matteo Salvini and his agitation, his sometimes misanthropic and xenophobic slogans had mobilized countless people there.
The party sardine movement filled the squares and campaigned for an open civil society.
In the end, the right had no chance.
But the League has learned from it.
Salvini is no longer as aggressive as he used to be, he prefers to talk about the difficult start to school instead of illegal migrants.
He, who likes to be the center of attention, even decided not to parachute over Arezzo as originally planned.
Even he saw that the stunt would have stolen the show from his candidate on site.
And when a woman of African descent tore the rosary from his neck and tore his shirt during the election campaign, he didn't scold foreigners, but rather thanked him affably for the many new rosaries and shirts he had been given.
Eugenio Giani, the top candidate for the Social Democrats, on the other hand, looks like a Tuscan version of Joe Biden, he's always been there.
He took on his first political office when his young Lega competitor Ceccardi was not even in kindergarten. He is currently President of the Tuscan regional parliament.
His hobbies - heraldry and medical history - seem remarkably boring, his visions rather pragmatic and dry.
He is not worried about Tuscany, which in his eyes surpasses almost all other regions of Italy with its prosperity.
The national trend worries him.
"The Lega and its right-wing partners are currently in fashion across the country," they profited from a social malaise in the rest of the country, Giani told SPIEGEL on the sidelines of his appearance in Viareggio.
"We're falling back into the Middle Ages"
He wants to seal off his homeland from this trend as much as possible.
Salvini will be gone after the election, predicts the historian, who is also president of the Casa Dante museum in Florence.
But if his young governor wins, he fears that relations with Europe will be destroyed.
"Then Tuscany will move in a completely different direction."
A few days ago, Enrico Letta, Italy's left Prime Minister from 2013 to 2014, put it similarly.
"Our government is not with Budapest and Warsaw, but with Berlin and Paris," he said in an interview about the time after Salvini lost power a year ago.
"We switched from Orban to Merkel."
A 17-year-old student, his name is Alessio, approaches Giani in Viareggio.
The two walk a few hundred meters through a park and talk.
Most of his contemporaries do not know what the Social Democrats stand for, says Alessio afterwards of the conversation.
"The party has moved too far away from young people."
If he were allowed to vote, he would vote for the Social Democrats.
But he doesn't like the Lega candidate Ceccardi badly either.
"She seems genuinely correct, and she speaks to us boys clearly."
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Lega politician Ceccardi: "Demonization doesn't work for me"
Photo: ALBERTO LINGRIA / REUTERS
"Nightmare Tuscany" was the headline of Italian newspapers, and the Partito Democratico was threatened with "Armageddon".
Most of the left believe they can do it all over again.
But they need the fear of right-wing danger to mobilize their voters.
"If Ceccardi wins, we'll fall back into the Middle Ages," warned a PD minister from Rome about the Lega candidate during the election campaign.
"She is a wolf in sheep's clothing," said the mayor of Florence.
In Prato, a suburb of Florence, she fought against new bike paths because they were only used by migrants.
Now it's about showing the real face of the Lega: "intolerant, discriminatory, anti-European."
There is a lot at stake for both sides.
Matteo Salvini wants to regain the interpretative sovereignty in the country after he was sidelined during the lockdown and Prime Minister Conte set the agenda as crisis manager.
And Conte's coalition must finally turn its successes in corona politics into political capital - which is particularly difficult for the 5-star movement: In most regions, the stars are not ready to enter into an electoral alliance with their government partner in Rome.
You run your own candidates and weaken your own government.
And Susanna Ceccardi?
Salvini's top candidate tries to calm the mood.
On the stage in Florence she speaks of health care and transport policy;
She avoids attacks against Europe or migrants.
Instead, the 33-year-old prefers to criticize the alleged nepotism in the region.
"Those who roll up their sleeves should be rewarded," she exclaims to the cheers of the fans, "and not those who only have the right party book".
Otherwise, the lawyer relies on her experience in Cascina, a Tuscan coastal town ruled by LInken for decades, where she won the mayor's office in 2016.
Now the others made the same mistake again as they did then, said Ceccardi in an interview with "La Repubblica": "Demonization doesn't work for me."
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