Aboubakar Soumahoro, an Ivorian by birth, speaks Italian with an echo of the south. He 23 years ago he did not speak anything. He learned it by working for years in the fields as a day laborer. He then became a trade unionist, graduated in Sociology and, in August 2020, created the Liga de los Temporeros, a network to give a voice to day laborers, ‘riders’ and other exploited workers. Soumahoro thus became one of the main champions of a group that today in Italy is something more visible and better organized that years ago In this way, this 42-year-old African, today a naturalized Italian, also gained a certain national projection in the country; So much so that, for the Italian elections on September 25, Soumahoro has been a candidate for the center-left in Modena, the capital of Emilia Romagna.
The paradox is that if Soumahoro’s story is a history of resistance, the same can be said of Emilia Romagna. Not only because in this land there was a very strong partisan movement during World War II and the Italian Communist Party came to devastate, even when the Christian Democracy won in the rest of the country. Also because, beyond a few cracks, modern social democracy and its main representative in Italy, the Democratic Party (PD), as well as its left-wing allies, have maintained a consensus prolonging in time that little has cracked until now. There were attempts, yes. The last one: in 2020, when the leader of the far-right League, Matteo Salvini, brought out his entire political arsenal to conquer the regional government of Emilia Romagna, which caused citizens to turn out en masse to vote to defeat him.
Centre-left strongholds
The result of this is that much of this region, and of nearby Tuscany, could be, after the general elections, the only areas of Italy still in the hands of the center-left Italian. The only ones in which the advance of the right-wing coalition led by the post-fascist Brothers of Italy is stopped. In the maps that illustrate the forecast of the intention to vote for the next Italian elections, it is very clear: while in almost the entire country the forecast is for a comfortable victory for the right, in a good part of these two regions it is considered ‘armored’ the victory of the center left.
It does not seem like a coincidence that Enrico Letta, the leader of the PD, was born in Pisa, an important tourist city in Tuscany, and that the party’s candidate for prime minister, the Italian-American Elly Schlein, spent much of her political career in Emilia Romagna.
“Sure, here’s a entrenched anti-fascist culture very present in society”, says Carlo Bracetti, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence. “Although a very important element that also coincides with this protracted success of the center-left is that there has continued to be a central role in defending the rights of the working class and workers in general”, warns this expert.
Where there is better distribution of wealth, there are fewer social conflicts. And well-being has been –and is– in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. The former is the third region with the highest GDP (after Lombardy and Veneto) in Italy, and its unemployment rate is 5.5% (the national rate is 7.9%). In the second, the wealth of families in the period of the pandemic has even grown slightly, according to the latest report from the Bank of Italy. “The presence of immigrant workers is also perceived in a more favorable way than in other parts of the country,” says Bracetti. There is an answer to the reason for the candidacy of Soumahoro, the Ivorian trade unionist.
Cooperatives and SMEs
Giuditta Pini, an outgoing PD deputy from Modena, was 29 years old when she first won a seat in the Italian Congress. According to her, the prosperity of these territories and their link with the center-left is also explained by “the fabric of cooperatives and small and medium enterprises that here they have always been an important part of the local economy, and that now they have also resisted the pandemic, ”he explains.
In some cases, in addition, the turn of some locality to the right has also coincided with new turbulence. The most recent example is that of the current political battle in Piombino (Tuscany), where citizens are fiercely opposed to the installation of a regasification vessel proposed by the outgoing government of Mario Draghi to deal with the energy crisis. A fight that is also supported by the current right-wing mayor Francesco Ferrari, curiously, only two years ago in charge of this city after 70 years of progressive governments.