Salis Effect, Renzi aims at Genoa: first the Italia Viva assembly, then the coalition test

It is "not by chance", according to Senator Matteo Renzi , that the next national assembly of his party will be organized in Genoa by the end of this month. The news was given by the former Prime Minister himself, with a note of a few lines on what since the time of his rise to government has always been his "armed wing" in terms of communication, his newsletter, Enews. And to the political world it seemed an obvious attempt to claim their role both in the victory in the Genoa elections of Silvia Salis , repeatedly indicated as a "personal friend", and (and above all) in what will come next.

"In the next few days the call for the national assembly of Italia Viva that we will hold in Genoa will arrive, I invite everyone to lend a hand in these days for the 2x1000", Renzi writes to his followers, in the same communication that launches for the next 3, 4 and 5 October the return of the Leopolda, the great political demonstration that the leader of Iv organizes in Florence every year and has accompanied his rise in politics. A fixed appointment of which Salis has already been a guest and of which her husband, Fausto Brizzi , has been the author in several editions. And from which, at least in the next editions, including that of 2025, a piece of the future of the path of the new mayor of Genoa could also pass.

If the post-election comment by the Northern League deputy minister Edoardo Rixi , who last week stings the Genoese centre-left in Repubblica may have seemed too caustic ("Renzi has confirmed himself as a true number one: he managed to impose his mayor on the PD without adding a single vote", he hissed), it is also true that the bond between the new mayor Salis and the centrist area close to Italia Viva is strong.

And if the interested party herself professes caution (almost) at every step ("I have no national ambitions, now I have to work for Genoa: we have five years of work ahead of us", she makes clear whenever she can), it is clear that for her any eventual, possible, future political space will have to be sought precisely starting from that center of the center-left now perpetually waiting for refoundation. Especially if the Genoese laboratory, the very broad field that won the elections united and will now have to be tested by the government, will function without too many repercussions.

For the moment, Iv's move to Genoa for its new assembly five years after the very first one, in Cinecittà in 2020, is thus worth an investment and a message, a program and a test of political positioning. In Renzi's quota, despite the disappointing result at the polls (it is true that in terms of points it can be defined as "decisive", but the reformist list did not even reach 3 percent), Genoa has become "the symbolic city of the united center-left that wins", but above all the test to evaluate in the field the goodness of last year's choice, when partly surprisingly Renzi decided to veer to the left after two years spent (even in Genoa) looking to the right.

This is why the future of the city is at stake in the next five years of administration, but also other crossed destiny. That of the new mayor at her first, real test in politics, but also that of the united center-left so often evoked by Elly Schlein, secretary of the Democratic Party, and obviously of the player politician par excellence, Matteo Renzi. Brizzi wrote him a good part of the first, historic Leopoldas of the rise to the Democratic Party and to government, Salis could be part of the history of the next ones.