- On Sunday, regional elections are held in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. According to the latest polls, taking advantage of the electoral collapse of the Five Stars (M5S) movement, he could win the Lega of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who remains undefeated.
This territory of the car industry and the well-known film Novecento, the Red Emilia, has historically been a stronghold of the Communist Party and the leftist movements, hence its nickname. Symbol of labour conflicts and class struggle, in which the Left has ruled for 75 consecutive years. The First Communist Party, the Democratic Party (PD), now located in the centre-left of the opposition.
Salvini wants to take advantage of all elections to show electioneally their strength and erode government
This historic trend can be halted at the Sunday election date. With a clear objective of priority, there have been many references that the leader of the Lega has made during the campaign to the status of worker of the territory. “The Democratic Party is no longer a workers’ party, it is a party in the hands of financiers and powerful,” he said last week, at a rally in Maranello where he saw Ferrari creating the car brand. The extreme right leads the search for the electorate voting on the left.
Plebiscite to the Government led by Conte
After the breakdown of the Salvini Government Pact with the Five Star Movement during its period as Italian Minister of the Interior and the failure of its strategy of electoral advancement, came the formation of a center-left government led by Giuseppe Conte.
Aware of this historic error, Salvini has managed to turn the regional elections on Sunday into a kind of plebiscite about the central government with the aim of returning the far-right movement to the government in a short time.
Movement of sardines
Aware of the possibilities of the far-right, a group of friends founded the Sardines Movement in this same territory
Aware of the possibilities that the extreme right has to gain, a group of friends founded in this same territory the popular movement known as the “Sardines Movement”, which in a short time has spread to the whole of Italy. The movement intends to deal with the discourse of the far-right.
There have been many demonstrations by the movement in many cities in Italy. The initiative that took place last Sunday in Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, was particularly intense and, according to the many media, it had more than 40,000 people.
In view of the demands of the need to mobilise before the law, it remains to be seen whether this makeshift citizen mobilisation will suffice to paralyse the far-right in the Sunday elections. In the video below, called by the sardine movement, thousands of people singing Bella Ciao in Bologna.