Rome. There’s no name, the table is virtual, and there are even rumours of a certain tendency to flee (along the lines of: better a seat in Parliament). The fact is that the centre-right has not yet found a way out of the problem of ‘finding a mayoral candidate to challenge Roberto Gualtieri next year’, despite the fact that Arianna Meloni, last week, during the FdI party at the Giardino degli Aranci, rallied the troops with a rousing call: ‘We want to win the Rome municipal elections because we want to govern this city. Also because, after five years of the Five Star Movement and five of the PD, I believe the people of Rome do not deserve another five years of the left.” There was certainly optimism: “Rome needs to be governed,” said the head of FdI’s political secretariat and membership officer, “and it needs to be given a voice, not used as a backdrop for TikTok videos. FdI, together with the whole centre-right, can make a difference, just as it did when governing the nation.” Except that, apart from Fabio Rampelli, the Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies who had indicated his willingness to stand (“if they asked me, I couldn’t say no”, he had said a few months ago), there is no queue of candidates on the right for Rome. And Rampelli himself, in this context, has taken a more backseat position. Regarding the 2027 local elections, he said at the Giardino degli Aranci: “We haven’t yet turned our attention to choosing a mayoral candidate; we are focused on governing the nation and the region. The results will follow naturally. If we have governed well, the mayoral candidate will be a secondary issue, because I think and hope that the citizens will reward the work we are doing”. The fact is that the profile of Rampelli’s “ideal candidate”, as described by Rampelli himself at the FdI party in Rome, according to an insider, “resembles him very closely”: “Someone from the social and popular right,” was the profile put forward by Rampelli, “rooted in the suburbs but able to speak in a way that transcends class divisions, even to those districts and neighbourhoods in the historic centre which today are practically in the same conditions as the city’s outermost suburbs.” And yet, within the centre-right, there are those who still dream of the perfect civic profile, following the departure of the original frontrunner, Giovanni Malagò, to the FIGC. Meanwhile, the only certainty (for FdI) is to press ahead with the powers of Roma Capitale, following the PD’s abstention. In the absence of a name, it would at least serve as a calling card.
