A new season for the 'Martian' Marino, the former mayor of Rome, candidate at the European elections with the Greens and the Left

Ignazio Marino will be a candidate on the lists of the Green and Left Alliance in the European elections. And he will run as chief candidate in the Centre constituency. The decision, in the air for days, was made official today in a press conference at the Foreign Press Room in Palazzo Grazioli. Marino has been back at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia since 2016, where he had been the director of the Organ Transplantation Institute and where he now holds the position of executive vice-president. He has chosen to return to the field and position himself to the left of what used to be his party (the PD, for which he also ran in the primaries as secretary in 2009).

The professor of surgery, who could be number one in the Centro constituency, had disappeared from the political scene after his 'defenestration' as mayor of Rome by the Dem city councillors themselves, who 'challenged' him by resigning en masse in front of a notary public, interrupting halfway through his mandate, which began in June 2013 and ended in October 2015. The 'Martian' first citizen (he called himself this in the title of an autobiographical book in which he recounted his experience as si Roma), pacifist and environmentalist (it was he who had the Malagrotta mega-dump closed down in October 2013), came back to disrupt, to annoy his former Dem friends and subtract votes from the 5 Star Movement.

Marino, who had also been contacted by Michele Santoro for a candidacy in his pacifist list, is back in the field in the hope (his and the leaders Fratoianni and Bonelli's) of towing the Green and Left Alliance list beyond 4% (the latest polls give it just below the threshold), riding on the themes that are dearest to him, which are environmentalism, public health, stopping the sending of weapons to Ukraine and the recognition of the State of Palestine with annexed ceasefire.

The administration of the Marino junta, which ended prematurely in a resounding manner, was characterised by the first citizen's initiatives and attitudes of breaking with the past that polarised opinions on his actions. While Marino's detractors justify their criticism of him, which has been widely reported in the media, mainly by accusing him of incapacity, his supporters claim that the political and administrative choices he has made have undermined the rents of certain categories of people, who have always been privileged thanks to an unsuspecting or even corrupt political class (as emerges from the Mafia Capitale investigation), and that this is why the mayor has been the object of denigration campaigns.