Five Star Protest Party Wins Italy’s Mayoral Races
MEP: The anti-establishment Five Star Movement has made big gains in the mayoral election in Rome and Turin on Sunday.
The result represented a major breakthrough for 5-Star, which feeds off popular anger over widespread corruption, with the party’s Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, making history by becoming the first woman mayor in the Italian capital.
“A new era is beginning with us,” said Raggi. “We’ll work to bring back legality and transparency to the city’s institutions.”
Raggi ran on a platform focused on fighting corruption and cronyism.
Giachetti, a candidate from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party (PD) – Italy’s largest party- garnered between 31 to 35 percent of the vote.
The local elections were held in two stages, with a first round two weeks ago and the second round on Sunday.
Ms Raggi will find a city mired in debts of more than €13bn (£10bn; $15bn) – twice its annual budget.
Italy’s governing Democratic Party, which has secured Italy’s financial capital, Milan, and Bologna, has been under fire for widespread corruption charges.
Meanwhile, her opponent, the center-left’s Roberto Giachetti, received only 33 percent of the vote. Giachetti conceded defeat before the final results were announced.
“I just called Virginia Raggi and paid my compliments,” he said, as cited by RomaToday. He admitted that it had been a tough election campaign from the very beginning and he promised to “continue to work for Rome” as the part of a “constructive opposition.”
Some 8.6 million people, around a fifth of the total electorate, were eligible to vote on Sunday in run-off ballots for mayors of 126 towns and cities where no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote in a first round of voting.
