Grottammare, the marquee pocket that has always been red for twenty-nine years

For twenty-nine years, in a town overlooking the Adriatic Sea in the south of the Marche, elections have always won a civic list that defines in one point of its statute itself as: «Solidarity and participation is a movement for the transformation of local reality». We are in Grottammare, fifteen thousand inhabitants of the province of Ascoli Piceno, and here the seasons pass but the truth never passes. On Sunday, candidate Alessandro Rocchi won with 56%, while the coalition led by the Brotherhood of Italy stopped at 30%, despite the statements and despite Georgia Meloni’s personal blessing for the young candidate, Marco Spricassie.

Grottammare has always been a conservative town. We live here on small business, tourism, nurseries…”, says Lorenzo Rossi, who will be deputy mayor of Rocky City under a gentlemen’s agreement made on the eve of the election, when he too (the favorite record guy) is in the running for president. Municipal.

“The capital always had the upper hand until 1994, when this left-wing civilian list arrived and won the elections – Rossi continues -. This process continues to this day”. The first mayor of Solidarietà e Partecipazione was Massimo Rossi, a former proletarian democrat and then a communist re-establisher. Grotamare became with him the Italian Porto Alegre, also thanks to some practices imported directly from the Brazilian experience such as the participatory budget, an original democratic path It consists of gatherings and discussions between the administration and the citizens. “In Porto Alegre, we were also invited to talk about our experience, and then the administrators’ trainers came here to study what was happening. Grotamare also speaks a lot at the faculties of political science.”

Indeed, there was some fear on the eve of the last election. That is, it was suspected that victory might not come in the first round: the former mayor, Enrico Bergalini, had imposed himself five years earlier with the ancestry of the Warsaw Pact, but after nearly thirty years from the beginning of solidarity and participation, the suspicion that the wave of unanimity was It could shrink a little bit it was real. The right has staked everything: “It’s time for a change,” the unfortunate Sprecacè repeated at every rally, not realizing that he had been sent to fight a battle that was practically impossible to win. Rossi concludes, “People realize that our model is still working and that it is capable of renewing itself.”

Thanks to the famous “Wednesday meetings”, the weekly appointments in which meetings of Solidarity and Sharing are watched and anyone can intervene to give their opinion on administrative matters. The parties participate but do not invade the field. The rest was explained by cartoonist Michael Rochte, aka Maicol and Mirko, who endorsed Rocci’s candidacy and with some illustrations told a little about what’s going on in Grottammare before concluding: “Who would be crazy enough to change management?” Effective way.