Telosaes.it

"Depopulation is our most urgent national emergency. When a village dies, so do traditions and age-old knowledge, typical products only found in these places and nowhere else, the landscape and rural architecture disappear, a part of our national identity vanishes."

Telos: Every time there is talk of the direct election of the Prime Minister, the evocative expression “The Mayor of Italy” is used. Is it true that today Mayors, in administering their cities, have more power than the Prime Minister?

Massimo Castelli: Mayors need to be directly elected to provide stability to city administrations, this was the reason for the 1993 electoral reform.
Under the previous proportional system, this stability was linked to agreements between the parties, which would often see shifts in alliances, majorities and the Mayor in turn over the course of the administrative term.
Mayors’ current strength stems from the fact that they are directly elected by citizens and if they topple, so does the City Council.
In order to compare the Mayor to the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister would have to be directly elected by citizens, and if the Parliament loses confidence in him, new elections would need to be held. That’s not how things are today, so you can’t compare the two.
So, the Mayor doesn’t have more power, but he definitely he has more authority, which derives from the fact that he has been directly elected by the citizens.

The breakdown in the party system has likely been the source of people’s widespread anti-political sentiment. And yet this gap between citizens and politics is not nearly as wide when it comes to the Mayor. Are your citizens still passionate about politics?

The traditional party system was based on the sound foundations of ideology and ideals: people had different ideas about society, and fierce clashes, but they respected their opponents and mutually legitimised one another.
Today, there is a tendency towards leaderism, one-man parties and to very easily switch political group. Citizens are disoriented, healthy political discussion has disappeared and been replaced by fighting, insults and constant attempts to delegitimise each other.
The first form of anti-politics comes from politics itself. When I go to a café in my hometown, nobody is passionate about politics anymore. All you hear is “They’re all the same.”
But if you’ve done a good job as Mayor, they acknowledge that, you have a coffee and find out you’re not in the “they’re all the same” category, you’re “one of us.”

It must be interesting being the Mayor of Cerignale, a small town with 122 people and a million trees. A place that symbolises the growing problem of the depopulation of towns and villages, which you have been fighting against at the institutional and programmatic level. Could you please tell us about some of the things you’ve done to save your town?

Depopulation is our most urgent national emergency. When a village dies, so do traditions and age-old knowledge, typical products only found in these places and nowhere else, the landscape and rural architecture disappear, a part of our national identity vanishes.
What we’re struggling to do in ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities) is to illustrate how, in this historic moment where spaces, green areas, a new way of thinking about social relations are all becoming key issues – and important economic issues as well (take the green economy, for example) – a world and all its potential is disappearing.
In order to relaunch, we urgently need “revolutionary” legislative framework that lays the groundwork for people to return.
We’re late and much of Italy risks being abandoned. In my small town, the first thing that was done was to rebuild a strong sense of community identity among my citizens.
“We aren’t losers…”, actually we’re really lucky because we have a million trees as our fellow citizens. Basically, I tried to focus on our potential.
We built a small hydroelectric plant where there was once an old mill, on most of the roofs of the municipal buildings we installed solar panels.
These interventions, along with switching to LED lights in all public lighting, have given us total energy independence, without producing a single gram of carbon.
To restore the village’s identity, we redefined and improved many public areas, we created a city bakery, a laundry, an illuminated waterway, an ecomuseum, a community centre and two new squares where the young and old can gather.
We created a “social taxi” for residents and a volunteer service for the Association for Active Ageing (AUSER) that meets the needs of particularly vulnerable people.
Right now, we are renovating our city hall to create, not just new offices, but a new healthcare area for telemedicine and two teleworking stations for people who are now working from home. All this activism has aroused people’s curiosity and interest in this town that doesn’t want to die, so we have a lot more tourists, new residents and lots of hope for a better future.

You’ve been the ANCI Coordinator of Small Municipalities for a long time now. One thing you said is memorable: “We can no longer tolerate laws being made as if municipalities were business committees.” What are the most urgent needs that you are promoting within the Association and especially before the government for “Your” fellow-members?

The key words for the Small Municipalities I represent within ANCI are: return, streamline, differentiate.
“Return” means coming up with structural policies and new regulations to combat the depopulation affecting over 2,000 Small Towns and almost half the national territory.
“Streamline” means overcoming bureaucracy, which has high costs in terms of time and money and is often just an end in itself.
The fact that it takes eight months to carry out a public tender procedure and maybe only three to do the work is unacceptable.
“Differentiate” means creating different regulations, because we aren’t all the same. It doesn’t make sense that a regulation, for example one on staff hiring, is the same for the 24,000 employees of the City of Rome as for the 3 of the City of Cerignale.
I could go on and on. I’d like to point out that this inability of the regulations to adapt to actual situations leads to the closing of schools, hospitals and so on, which just happen to always be in the areas of our Country that face the greatest challenges.
This is what we need to fight for in ANCI: regulations, rules, investments to ensure all Italians have the same constitutional rights regardless of where they were born or where they live.
Unfortunately, today there are 2 Italies: a first-class Italy and a second-class Italy. What we’re asking politicians is for everyone to be in the same class.
We can’t win the battles on the horizon unless we do it all together, cities, towns and country. If we don’t, there will be no winner, only losers.

Marco Sonsini