Who is de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna who is picking up Bonaccini's legacy

The post-Stefano Bonaccini in Emilia Romagna has the face ofMichele de Pascale, the PD candidate who won the challenge with Elena Ugolini for the presidency of the region. In his headquarters in Bologna, where he arrived at five o'clock in the afternoon, all the more or less quarrelsome souls of the PD, as well as exponents of the allied parties, were there to give him a standing ovation. If the wide field struggles from Liguria to Basilicata, here the mayor of Ravenna has been able to replicate what he did in Romagna: an alliance that would hold together from Italia viva to the Greens and the M5s, who have supported him from the beginning despite a mandate in Ravenna marked by works that elsewhere have found the barricades of ecologists, starting with the regasifier.

The new regional president comes from Cervia, is 39 years old and has been in politics since he was at school. De Pascale supported Stefano Bonaccini in the primaries that crowned Elly Schlein, but this did not prevent the Pd secretary from giving the OK to her candidature, endorsing the outgoing governor's choice. Closing the candidature discourse in the summer was the step back of Vincenzo Colla, historical leader of the CGIL and then powerful councillor for economic development in Emilia-Romagna. The first person de Pascale embraced from the stage set up in the Region, his eyes shining, was Colla himself, who in the meantime has become head of his Programme Factory and will have a role in the next junta.

De Pascale's candidacy is symbolic of the territory's recent history: in addition to being mayor of Ravenna, he was the president of the province hardest hit by the floods that sent Emilia-Romagna under water four times in a year and a half. It was he, in May 2023, who asked the Cab Terra cooperative to flood its fields to prevent the water from submerging the capital of Romagna. The mayor of the flood (who from 2019 is also president of the Upi, the Union of Italian Provinces) now aspires to be the president of the flood: almost daily, during the election campaign, he called for the new governor to become commissioner for reconstruction. And from the stage he sent a clear message to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni: 'It has been a year and a half of political speculation, of clashes. In our land people are afraid, businesses are wondering what they have to do for their future. From this election campaign the political speculation must end and a new institutional collaboration for Emilia-Romagna must begin. I hope already in the next few days to be able to meet the Prime Minister and on this to mark a change of pace'.

In 2013 he became provincial secretary of the Ravenna PD. A candidate in the 2016 local elections at the head of the centre-left coalition, he was chosen by the people of Ravenna as mayor on 19 June 2016. He ran again in 2021 and was re-elected on 3 and 4 October, garnering 59.47% of the vote. On 18 December 2021, he was re-elected president of the Province of Ravenna (his first term began on 4 August 2016). In February 2019, he was unanimously elected President of Upi (Union of Italian Provinces).