A new season for the “Martian” Marino, the former mayor of Rome who is a candidate for the European elections with the greens and the left

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Ignazio Marino will be a candidate on the lists of the Green and Left Alliance in the European elections. And he will run as head of the list in the Center constituency. The decision, which has been in the air for days, was made official today, in a press conference at the Foreign Press Room at Palazzo Grazioli. In 2016, Marino returned to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia where he had been the director of the Organ Transplant Institute and where he now holds the role of executive vice president. He chose to return to the field and position himself to the left of his former party (the Democratic Party, for which he also ran in the primaries as secretary in 2009).

The return of the “Martian” mayor

The professor of surgery, who might be number one in the Centro constituency, had disappeared from the political scene following his “defenestration” as mayor of Rome by the same dem city councilors, who “distrusted” him by resigning en masse in front of a notary, interrupting his mandate halfway, which began in June 2013 and ended in October 2015. The first “Martian” citizen (he defined himself as such in the title of an autobiographical book in which he recounted his experience in Rome), pacifist and environmentalist (he was to close down the Malagrotta mega-landfill in October 2013), has returned to disrupt the situation, to annoy former dem friends and steal votes from the 5 Star Movement.

The votes of the pacifists disputed

Marino, who had also been contacted by Michele Santoro for a candidacy on his pacifist list, returns to the field in the hope (his and that of the leaders Fratoianni and Bonelli) of driving the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra list above 4% (the latest polls give it just below the threshold) riding on the issues dearest to him, which are environmentalism, public health, stopping the sending of weapons to Ukraine and recognition of the State of Palestine with an attached ceasefire.

Polarized opinions

The administration of the Marino council, which ended sensationally early, was characterized by initiatives and attitudes of the mayor that broke with the past and polarized opinions on his work. While Marino’s detractors justify the criticisms once morest him, which have had wide coverage in the media, mainly with the accusation of incompetence, his supporters claim that the political and administrative choices he has made have dented his position of certain categories of people, who have always been privileged thanks to a slothful or even corrupt political class (as emerges from the Mafia Capitale investigation), and who for this reason the mayor has been the subject of denigration campaigns.