Years ago I happened to participate in a cultural meeting (the presentation of a San Paolo book) with the then mayor Vincenzo De Luca, in his Salerno. It seems to me that it was his second mandate (of the five overall). Since we were both well ahead of the start of the event, De Luca proposed to me: “Come, let’s take a walk, I’ll show you some curiosities of the city.” It was a summer Saturday evening, around 7pm. We left the room and began walking along the main street. It was like working alongside a personality halfway between a President of the Republic without cuirassiers and a first cousin of all the people of Salerno. Everyone we passed subjected us to a barrage of greetings and jokes, even the children said hello. Many stopped, as you stop with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. It was a crowd that lasted an hour and a half. Needless to say, I didn’t even see a shadow of the city’s curiosities. When we returned to the room he said to me: “Today there were quite a few people I knew, perhaps because of the time, it’s dinner time; ‘they’ll cook most of this’. In the meantime the room had become packed to capacity, overflowing onto the pavement. This is to tell you about the popularity of the man, who at the time – but I believe that things have not changed – many friends in Salerno and some enemies in Naples, starting with Bassolino. It was so pleasant that I immediately understood that that of a rough and contemptuous man like a Marsican wolf (he had also been like this with me in a previous report on waste collection that I did for Christian family) was a mask he often took off.
Vincenzo De Luca belongs to that political race that is disappearing: the provincial ras. Ancient figure, almost nineteenth-century, which television modernity should have swept away and which instead survives like certain olive trees twisted by the wind. He is not a leader built by talk shows, nor a product of a Roman laboratory. He grew up in a specific city, among specific faces, within a network of acquaintances, favors, enmities, gratitudes and resentments that last a lifetime. Its strength has never been ideology. It was the minute knowledge of the territory. De Luca knows Salerno like a parish priest knows the souls of his parish: one by one. Already in 2007 he won the Sole 24 Ore ranking of the mayors most loved by fellow citizens and 20 years later things must not have changed. Salerno was the cleanest city in Campania. At 7 in the morning he was often seen inspecting the bins because “certain ecological operators have the bad habit of not cleaning under the curbs of the pavements where cigarette butts collect”. Municipal employees call him “the beast”. He changed the brigade commander several times. The smooth and knock to a manager guilty of not having replaced an ecological operator who had been absent for a day remained famous. But the citizens like it. He wins subsequent mandates, evidently, because he leaves a good memory. He equipped the traffic police with truncheons. And he has always been inflexible with illegal immigrants. He cleared out the Chinese stalls on the seafront and cleared out a gypsy camp (but welcomed them into prefabricated buildings. In short: broom and order.
They called him “Pol Pot”, at the time of the PCI, for his ferocious character, for that abrupt way of liquidating opponents and dissidents. And in fact De Luca – born in 1948, degree in philosophy, Lucanian origins – has never been a political Christian Democrat, someone who seeks mediation or smiles out of prudence. “Vicienzo a funtana” (nickname due to the mania for putting fountains everywhere) is an ancient southerner, one of those who consider power a personal responsibility even before an institutional one. He decides. He’s in charge. And if there’s a fight, fight. If there is something to insult, insult. In the age of remote-controlled politicians spin doctorshe remains an instinctive, sanguine, even theatrical animal. An Eduardo De Filippo with less melancholy and more anger.
Now, at seventy-seven, he is back as mayor for the fifth time. And the most interesting fact is not the victory. It’s the way he won: without a party, without a campaign, without almost getting his hands dirty. The other candidates held debates, put up posters, organized meetings. Not him. He was waiting. Like certain monarchs who don’t feel the need to ask for consent because they consider it a natural inheritance. And in fact the consensus arrived, enormous, almost plebiscitary.
The paradox is that De Luca triumphed while his party pretended not to notice. The national Democratic Party tolerates him as one would tolerate a cumbersome old uncle: useful when he brings votes, embarrassing when he opens his mouth. And he reciprocates with identical affection. He never really considered himself a party man. Parties, for De Luca, are instruments; the city, on the other hand, is a sentimental property.
Naturally Salerno is not the Monte Carlo that he dreams of in his speeches. There is a Deluchian rhetoric made up of palm trees, street lamps, cruises and great works that often crashes into the reality of the South: degradation, youth violence, useless concrete, soulless squares. Piazza della Libertà, which was supposed to be the symbol of the Salerno Renaissance, today looks more like a giant concrete pan in the sun than a Mediterranean living room. The ships unload droves of hasty tourists in sandals and shorts, while the seafront, in the evening, loses the bourgeois tranquility that De Luca had promised.
But it would be a mistake to judge it only by urban planning results. De Luca is not an architect of politics. He is a tribal chief. And tribal leaders are judged by their relationship with the people. In Salerno that relationship still exists. It’s physical, almost carnal. You can see it in the greetings on the street, in the pats on the back, in the shopkeepers who speak to him without filters. Naples has never loved him because Naples is wary of men who are too vertical. Salerno, on the other hand, yes, because the people of Salerno see in De Luca a kind of irascible patriarch who shouts, rants, threatens, but in the end “holds family”, that is, he cares about the city like a father.
Behind the caricatural mask constructed by television – the governor who insults, who invents colorful metaphors, who speaks like a Bourbon marshal with flamethrowers – there is a rare quality in contemporary Italian politics: recognisability. De Luca doesn’t pretend to be young, modern, inclusive or kind. He doesn’t play the part of the enlightened progressive. It is what it is. And voters, especially in times of political plasticity, tend to reward originals rather than copies.
And perhaps the secret of his longevity lies right there: while the others changed their language, symbols and masks, he stubbornly remained himself.
