This Sunday at 3:30 PM at Acropolis, Christian Estrosi invited his collaborators, friends, supporters, political activists, and citizens. The purpose of the invitation is clear: “I have so much to tell you.” And, knowing the politician, it promises to be interesting!
One can already imagine the highlight of this meeting with a candidacy declaration for his own re-election. An announcement that will not really be one, however, as it was previously made public through a tweet.
The outgoing mayor will be the big favorite in the electoral competition and he will be able to face his challengers within the thick walls of the municipal citadel, for which he holds the keys at present. His competitors have the daunting task of finding ways to replace him, and it will not be an easy feat. We will have time to revisit this.
But, if one runs for public office for honor (and legitimate ambition), it’s also, and above all, because they carry a vision, a project to propose, and a program to implement. There is no doubt that by the end of the afternoon, Christian Estrosi will unveil it with all the emphasis for which he is known and which is his trademark.
We take the liberty to express here what we would like to hear: Politics must place man, with his needs and rights, at the center of its attention. It must seek the maximum well-being for all by trying to form a balanced and just society. And to remember that if history has condemned the illusion of a society of all equals, it has not eliminated each individual’s desire to be the least unequal possible.
Politics is the ability to defend the great human values as of the city, to interpret expectations and needs, to organize them for the well-being of the community, to guide appropriate responses, to lead necessary changes. We must work, without rest, to reduce the gap between the wealthy and the needy, which breaks the hope for dignity and justice. To do politics and govern is this and nothing else. Speak to the hearts of people, to the free and strong, free because strong and strong because free.
We do not know if Christian Estrosi – who claims the Italian (Umbria) origins of his grandparents, which is rare and to his credit in these times when immigration has become the plague of modernity and “We, the Gauls” the new label of purity of origin (Unfortunately, or fortunately, that only exists in the comic strips of Goscinny and Uderzo, the history of France is a completely different story) – has ever visited the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena on the magnificent Piazza del Campo, probably one of the most beautiful in the world and at the heart of which the famous Palio takes place.
If not, we allow ourselves to recommend it to him. He could admire the frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338: “The Effects of Good and Bad Government” (in Italian Allegorie ed effetti del Buono e Cattivo Governo) decorate the walls of the Sala dei Nove (the hall of Nine) and the Sala della Pace (Peace hall) of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. It was during the last communal government of Siena before the new political order, that of the oligarchic families, the Seigniories of the Renaissance (The Medici in Florence and Tuscany).
Scholarly readings have seen it as a true political treatise. It has been debated whether it illustrates Aristotle, revisited and corrected by Saint Thomas Aquinas, or Cicero reread by Italian notaries of the 13th century. But, in reality, these images have their own force: The practice of government. A defense and an illustration of the commune, this popular government, and a criticism of what seeks to engulf it, the seigniory, the power of one. By making this fresco a political act rather than a speech, Ambrogio Lorenzetti rendered it perpetually relevant. The image denounces tyranny but its very existence is the symptom of the communal fragility.
Collectively crafting the social order means living in opposition of values, ideas, interests, behaviors of each and every one. An exercise complicated and always to be renewed and a source of conflicts, whereas tyranny ends the quarrels… Therefore, social justice exists only at the risk of discord. Is tyranny sometimes not desired for its strength and authority?
Historical reflection becomes a current political questioning: Isn’t the Siena commune a relative of today’s communes? Doesn’t the political and social reality that Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted extend into our time?
And if power was nothing more than the ability to make us look up to what concerns us all?
Hence the sense of moral responsibility that must “inhabit” those who run for this public office on behalf of the citizen-electors. One is elected to pursue not the management of power but the common good.
