Old port city with new political force
With its historic centre of opulent palaces juxtaposed against a waterfront of industrial relics, Genoa has long been fertile ground for a political fight.
The Italian port where Christopher Columbus hailed from is also the home city of comic-turnedpolitician Beppe Grillo, who is spearheading an assault against the globalized world the explorer helped to forge.
With its faded mercantile past and present economic woes, Genoa is the kind of place that helps explain why Grillo’s Five Star Movement, which wants faster expulsions of illegal immigrants and a vote on Italy’s euro membership, is neck and neck with the governing Democratic Party in polls. Grillo, along with former prime minister Matteo Renzi and other leaders, is pushing for an early election. Five Star’s aim is to upend Italy in a way Donald Trump has America.
“Who else should we trust? We’ve tried everyone else,” Brunella Orlandini, 56, who with her husband plans to vote for Five Star for the first time, said in a café opposite Genoa’s city hall. “Five Star are new, the least corrupt, at least for now. They have energy, they get us involved and they listen to us.”
With mayoral elections due in almost 1,000 Italian cities and towns by mid-June, Five Star aims to build on wins in Rome and Turin last year. As the party aims to grab power in Italy, Genoa would be one of the biggest prizes, not least because it’s traditionally a force for radical change in the country.
A former independent city state, Genoa has long challenged the established order with explorers, mercenaries and revolutionaries over the centuries.
“Genoa has run out of patience,” said Nicholas Walton, the author of Genoa: ‘La Superba,’ a history of the city. “People feel abandoned because they haven’t shared in the wealth of the rest of northern Italy.”
For Alice Salvatore, a former English schoolteacher who is a Five Star regional councillor, the anti-globalization protests and subsequent riots at the Group of Eight summit hosted by Genoa in 2001 were her political awakening.
“More than in many other Italian cities, people here organize themselves at grassroots level,” Salvatore said.
Driving down the seafront in Genoa, Salvatore fumes against the city’s rulers past and present. Plans to reopen a disused coal-fired power station threaten nearby homes; a raised expressway cutting through Sampierdarena, the old shipbuilding district, has helped make it “a ghetto” for immigrants, she says.
Salvatore wants jobs created through better use of EU funds and tax incentives for entrepreneurs. She also wants tighter controls on how public money is spent on centres housing migrants.
Opponents say it’s easy to complain when you haven’t been in power. Genoa is just another example of discontent across the country rather than an illustration of Five Star’s grip on the city, according to Mayor Marco Doria.
“Five Star is like Donald Trump because they both attack the establishment and they think we’re better off on our own,” said Doria, a leftist who is a marquis by birth, though he doesn’t use the title. “But blaming the euro and migrants and globalization for Genoa’s problems is absurd; the truth is that Italy has been suffering an economic crisis since 2007.”