the investigations overwhelm the Dems –

Rita Cavallaro

07 April 2024

From Bari to Turin, passing through Lazio to Sicily, and now Elly Schlein’s Democratic Party is trembling because of the buying and selling of votes. Because what takes shape, from the investigations that overwhelm the Dems, is a patronage system so deep-rooted as to allow electoral successes paid for with cash, jobs and even privileged access to hospitals. A Votopoli model that often makes use of the intervention of the mafia. And which, despite the attempt to minimize it as a local practice from the stage in Bari, now scares the Nazarene too much, to the point of making more than one person murmur “everything goes down here”. On the other hand, there is the moral question at stake, which succumbs to the vote market. The latest arrest took place in Turin, with an operation that brought to light the infiltration of the ‘Ndrangheta into procurement in Piedmont. This is how, together with the leaders of the local Nirta-Pelle di San Luca, the Ras of the Democratic Party, Salvatore Gallo, a long-time politician and father of Raffaele, who is leader of the Democratic Party in the Piedmont Regional Council, ended up in handcuffs. Gallo senior is accused of electoral corruption for the Turin municipal elections of 3-4 October 2021.

When he managed to get eight councilors elected, including the municipality and the constituencies, with his IdeaTo association in support of the dem Lorusso list as mayor. A result achieved with the help of former manager Roberto Fantini, appointed as part of the Democratic Party to the Observatory on the legality of procurement, and arrested precisely for having favored the ‘ndrina in contracts for the maintenance of the Turin-Bardonecchia motorway. During the election campaign, the Ras of Votes, leveraging his son’s influence, had hired doctors in the healthcare sector to broaden the pool of consensus in the clinics. He worked with municipal officials to change the intended use of the voters’ real estate units. He had even had the bus stop in Via Sacchi restored to facilitate the flow of patients to a testing centre, as well as taking care of moving waste bins, violating the parameters of the highway code. Gallo even gave away free passes for the toll on the A32. Many jobs and favors in exchange for votes, but never cash donations. Which instead was the practice in Bari, where the 130 arrests for political-mafia exchange votes were added to the ten of the Cataldo-Maurodinoia system. A mechanism that favored the election of Antonio Decaro as mayor on 26 May 2019 and that of Michele Emiliano as governor of Puglia on 20-21 September 2020.

Of course, the Emilian system starts from further away, given that there are dozens of representatives of the Apulian Democratic Party involved in judicial proceedings. Emiliano himself ended up in the dock, and was acquitted last May, with his chief of staff and dem deputy Claudio Stefanazzi, who was instead convicted in the first instance for illicit financing together with the entrepreneur Vito Ladisa, because he was considered the intermediary between the governor and the catering giant. Emiliano also appointed Francesco Spina to the Board of Directors of InnovaPuglia, one of the regional agencies, the man who in a single night, in 2016, took the PD card together with 22 members of its majority and 400 other people. It’s a shame that he forgot to declare that he was mayor of Bisceglie and that he had two civil disputes pending, circumstances that would have prevented him from holding the position at InnovaPuglia. He was requested to be sent to trial for false ideology and false statements to a public official. From Puglia to Sicily the music does not change. It is in Trapani that the former regional deputy of the Democratic Party Paolo Ruggirello was sentenced to 12 years for mafia association, in the first instance. Considered the point of reference for the godfather Matteo Messina Denaro’s lieutenants, he finally admitted that the boss asked him, before the 2017 regional elections, for 50 thousand euros in exchange for 1,000 votes.