The strange case of the «grosse koalition» of San Vito Lo Capo. The mayoral candidate is supported by Fratelli d’Italia and Pd-Corriere.it

«Comrades, but you know what is happening to San Vito Lo Capo?”. The voice of Gerardo Cataffo, a life as a metalworker in Emilia before the buen retiro with his wife Marianna on the Sicilian West Coast, shakes the militants of the Pd meat sauce. On a Saturday morning in February, at the Gramsci club congress in via Pasubio everyone was talking about Stefano Bonaccini and Elly Schlein. Comrade Cataffo, on the other hand, rings the alarm on the Sicilian Democratic Party: «In May in San Vito Lo Capo we vote and the possibility of a civic list with the Brothers of Italy is being mooted… Our political identity begins in small towns, better to lose than to ally!».

The San Vito Democratic Party does not think so, which in the end fulfilled the prophecy of comrade Cataffo. Transforming the historic Trapani holiday village, today a beach magnet for international low-cost tourism, into the laboratory of the impossible alliance between Giorgia Meloni’s party and Elly Schlein’s new Democratic Party. Creator of big koalitions in San Vito sauce is Francesco La Sala, an esteemed accountant with bipartisan friendships determined to defeat Giuseppe Peraino at the polls, a civic close to the center-right who has already spent fifteen years of his life as mayor of San Vito Lo Capo and would gladly do another five.

Civic close to the center-right is also La Sala, which to launch its civic list SìAmo San Vito has chosen an appropriate slogan: “We are here, for everyone”. Actually, everyone is inside: from the Trapani treasurer of FdI Antonio Froiio, to the candidates of the San Vito Pd, Irene Pizzimenti and Salvo Ruggirello. The local circles of the Brothers of Italy and the Democratic Party, from their respective Facebook pages, have formalized their support for La Sala. He, the candidate who has brought the opposites together, mocks himself with an insular attitude. How did he get Melonians and Democrats to coexist on his list? “Look, I’m not a genius. San Vito – replies La Sala – is a small reality and in small realities people are trusted more, perhaps political ideologies are put aside to carry on collective projects».

Its collective civic list really is. And it does not only welcome the Pd and FdI: «Forza Italia is with us. And also the Movement for Autonomy». But did he leave something to the outgoing mayor Peraino? «I don’t know who stayed with him, maybe some closest friends…». With such a coalition, the result of the administrative elections of 28 and 29 May in San Vito Lo Capo would seem already written. And the internal problems of the Democratic Party, between a cold heat at the tables in via Savoia and an “incocciato” couscous as only here they can do, seem very distant. «Do you want to know if I’m with Schlein or Bonaccini? Look, I’ve always been centre-right, that’s my extraction. But if I really have to choose, I would say Bonaccini, he is a moderate ».