Florence administration, Schmidt and Funaro towards the runoff: here's who they are

It is a 10-way race in Florence to contest the succession to Dario Nardella (the vote will take place on 8 and 9 June, on the same days as the European elections). While the centre-right presents itself compactly and dreams of a 'reversal' with the conquest of the coveted 'red' city, the centre-left is in short order with an almost all-female challenge, with three candidates in the field, and the M5s running alone. A fragmentation that makes the hypothesis that the decisive challenge will be in the second round very real.

She is trying to pick up Nardella's baton Sara Funaro, niece of the mayor of the flooding Piero Bargellini, councillor at Palazzo Vecchio since 2014, supported by a coalition with Pd, Azione, Si, +Europa, Verdi, Volt, Partito repubblicano, Laburisti, Centro movement and the Anima Firenze 2030 list. Having failed to reach an agreement with the Pd, Iv (with Psi and Libdem) is fielding the vice-president of the Region Stefania Saccardi, and aims, a concept repeatedly reiterated by Renzi, to be the needle of the scales in a possible runoff. The centre-left is also running Cecilia Del Re, a former councillor in the second Nardella junta, from which she was dismissed in March 2023: she is head of the Firenze Democratica list, after having left the PD following a tear over the primaries that were not granted. After long negotiations that never came to fruition, first with the 11 August Association linked to Tomaso Montanari and then for a broad field with the Pd, M5s is running with Lorenzo Masi. On the left is Dmitrij Palagi, with Sinistra Progetto Comune (Possibile, Potere al Popolo and Prc), and Firenze ambientalista e solidale.

On the other side of the spectrum, the united centre-right (Fdi, Lega, and Fi) is betting on a non-political but well-known face in the city: Eike Schmidt, a German from Freiburg who became an Italian citizen last November, directed the Uffizi Galleries for eight years and is now the director, on leave, of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

The issues at the centre of the campaign, security, degradation, the Cascine park, but also traffic, tramways, overtourism, and the stadium. In a city that has been governed almost uninterruptedly by the left or centre-left since the post-war period, Funaro is also the favourite candidate and the one to whom the polls attribute the most support: much of the campaigning for this election, however, has been about Schmidt's candidature, partly because of him and partly because an unprecedented political fragmentation in the centre-left makes this election less predictable than previous ones.

It is precisely because of this fragmentation that it is certain that no candidate will obtain an absolute majority (i.e. more than 50 per cent of the votes) in the first round, and that there will therefore be a run-off, with the two most popular candidates facing each other in a further round of voting two weeks after the first. In all likelihood, the candidates will be Funaro and Schmidt: in this context, Schmidt is insistently trying to present himself as a candidate who is as neutral as possible, or at least not right-wing, so as to make himself palatable even to centre-left voters who will not vote for Funaro in the first round. This is why Schmidt has always avoided being accompanied by government representatives, to mark a kind of civic candidacy.