Several polls, whose publication is banned in the last two weeks before the election, have indicated that at most, 15% of voters want five more years of Raggi, though a large percentage of people said they were undecided. That means the top two finishers will meet in a runoff two weeks later. None of the 22 candidates for mayor this time is given any real chance of clinching more than 50% of the vote. Raggi's predecessor, a surgeon-turned-politician, had resigned months earlier amid an expense account scandal in which he was later vindicated. They had taken to cleaning up Rome themselves, neighborhood by neighborhood, park by park, bagging trash, filling potholes and passing the hat to pay gardening businesses to pull weeds in playgrounds. “Worse” is particularly damning, considering that when Romans elected her, they were desperate.

Great change was expected,'' said Paolo Conti, who for years has curated a letters-to-the-editors section, not surprisingly heavy with citizen complaints about trash and public transportation, in the Rome pages of the national newspaper Corriere della Sera.Īfter five years of Raggi's administration, plagued by frequent turnover of city commissioners and heads of public agencies, ”objectively, the city is in worse shape' than when she arrived, Conti said in an interview. Raggi's election “was hailed as something savior-like. She quickly became one of the most prominent faces of the 5-Star Movement, a grass-roots populist phenomenon created a decade earlier by an Italian comic, and, as of 2018, the largest party in the national Parliament. In 2016, Raggi was a 37-year-old, little-known lawyer and city council member when elected.

Towering pile of hats