The sight of Rome’s overflowing rubbish bins has long been a symbol of the city’s degradation, from a world capital whose beauty was captured by Federico Fellini to a gritty, graffiti-strewn place where it often seems no one can be bothered to keep the streets clean.
Now, those same bins look set to symbolise something even more rotten: broken promises and a political system seemingly immune to attempts at reform.
Virginia Raggi, a star of the populist Five Star movement, was elected as the first female mayor of the Eternal City in June on the back of a promise to make Rome more habitable and, quite literally, to clean it up.
But just weeks into the job, Raggi’s decision to appoint an environment councillor who earned hundreds of thousands of euros over 12 years as a consultant for the tarnished company that runs the city’s rubbish collection has been met with incredulity.
An ambitious plan to tidy up Rome by 20 August and turn around AMA, the rubbish collection company whose own management is in disarray, has been overshadowed by charges that Paola Muraro is unfit for the job and saddled with too many conflicts of interest. For now, Raggi is standing by her pick, and Muraro is hitting back against her critics.
“I have no conflict of interest,” Muraro wrote in defence of her work on a blog run by Five Star movement founder Beppe Grillo. “What in any administration would be considered an added value – expertise and experience – is used by the old guard as if they were negative, because they tremble at the political will being shown to fix the damage that they themselves have started.”
But Raggi’s opponents in the Democratic party (PD) have wasted no time seizing on the controversy.
“The PD that I represent wants to know what role she played at AMA for 12 years, spending Romans’ money,” said Michela di Biase, a PD member of Rome’s city council. She also accused the M5S, a vocal proponent of transparency, of running away from the debate.
Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst at political risk consultancy Teneo, said questions over Muraro are not Raggi’s only problem. The new mayor has also had run-ins with party members who wanted more input in putting together her administration, which has potentially isolated her.
“The first test is the garbage. Raggi inherited a difficult situation and now she has chosen the wrong person to take care of it. If someone voted for her for change, well, the trash is there on the street. It all looks like deja vu,” Piccoli said.
One bit of good news for Raggi: rubbish collection is still a big problem in Campania and Sicily, in territories controlled by the PD, where the issue is closely linked to the prevalence of organised crime. Although the issue has hurt her, the new mayor does not appear to have lost the confidence of Romans.
The issue is resonating beyond Rome because Raggi’s party, the M5S, has become such a political force that it now represents a real threat to the PD prime minister, Matteo Renzi. Renzi has sworn to resign if he fails to win a referendum that will likely be held in November on constitutional reforms he has championed since he assumed power in 2014, giving the M5S a potential opening to assume control in the next elections.
Before the mayor’s race this year, one of the theories that was often floated was that Renzi might want his party to lose the race, and for Raggi to fail, proving that the M5S, which for years was merely seen as a protest party, was not fit to lead.
Francesco Galietti, the founder of the advisory firm Policy Sonar, in Rome, said at least part of the conspiracy theory was right.
“I don’t think it was the PD that let Raggi win – the PD actually lost – but the second part is true. Now they want the Five Star Movement to fail so that the party loses traction.”
