Citizen rage puts Rome on track for first female mayor
ROME: ‘ Bread and circuses’ was the formula that ancient Rome’s rulers hoped would keep the restless natives happy.
Two millennia later, residents of the Eternal City just want their buses to turn up on time, holes in the roads filled and garbage collected and dealt with safely.
Virginia Raggi says that is why she put her legal career on hold in a bid to become the Italian capital’s first female mayor, as the candidate of the populist Five Star movement.
An elegant brunette, the 37-yearold lawyer has been feted by local media as a dark- eyed beauty.
She is leading opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting and looks a sure- fire bet to make it into the June 19 runoff.
Her campaign made the most of simmering discontent in the city, over everything from endemic double-parking to chronic levels of absenteeism from public offices.
“Rome has to first and foremost get back to being a normal city,” Raggi told AFP in an interview.
“For ordinary Romans it is not that at the moment, it is an extremely difficult place to live and that is not right for the capital of Italy.”
Rome has been run since late last year by an official appointed after Ignazio Marino quit as mayor, having been disowned by party allies in the centre-left government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi over an expenses scandal.
The city is also still dealing with the fallout from Mafia Capitale, a scandal that erupted in late 2014 when dozens of businessmen, politicians and officials were arrested on suspicion of having conspired for years to siphon off city funds through rigged tenders and other scams. — AFP