Cozzolino, Bassolino’s former dolphin. In 2011 the case of the disputed primaries

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Up to now there were no formal charges against Andrea Cozzolino but he had nonetheless been dragged into Qatargate, the scandal of bribes to European politicians and officials which led to the arrest, among others, of former socialist MEP Antonio Panzeri, and Francesco Giorgi . Giorgi himself, who is Cozzolino’s parliamentary assistant, would have indicated in his confession to the magistrates that he suspects the Pd MEP of having taken money through Panzeri. According to the Brussels prosecutor’s office, the Pd MEP would be the third man who acted for money together with Giorgi and Panzeri.

From Naples to Strasbourg

Cozzolino had called himself out “indignant” assuring that he was completely unrelated to the investigation. The Democratic Party has decided through the national guarantee commission to suspend him “cautiously” from the register of members and voters of the Democratic Party, “as well as from all the party bodies of which he should possibly be a part.

Sixty years old, former regional councilor of Campania in the early 2000s and now MEP in his third term, “raised in the heart of the Neapolitan province”, married and father of three children, Cozzolino has a long political apprenticeship behind him which began in the FGCI and then continued through the metamorphoses that led the PCI to first become PDS, then DS and finally to merge into the Democratic Party. Before arriving in Strasbourg, Cazzolino had been councilor for agriculture and productive activities in the junta of Antonio Bassolino. Of the former mayor and camopanao governor he was considered the dauphin.

The contested primaries for the mayor of Naples

Among the founders in the seventies of the association of Neapolitan students against the Camorra, in 2011 he was the protagonist of a complicated page in the history of the Neapolitan Democratic Party: he surprisingly won the center-left primaries for the choice of the candidate for mayor of Naples with a gap of 1,200 votes on the favorite Umberto Ranieri. Who, together with the other two opponents (the democrat Nicola Oddati and Libero Mancuso di Sel), immediately contested the result. An endless queue of controversies and accusations of fraud arose which led to substantially invalidating the result. The then democratic leader Pierluigi Bersani torpedoed the provincial secretary of the Democratic Party by appointing Andrea Orlando as commissioner, and the choice for the race for the Municipality fell on the prefect Mario Morcone, who left the scene in the first round.

A few months later, the shadow of Camorra infiltration also appeared in the competition: a few months later, the DDA opened a file with the hypothesis of a crime of threats aggravated by having favored a clan. The irregularities would have occurred in the Secondigliano district, a suburban area where the Camorra is strong.