Virginia Elena Raggi (Italian pronunciation: [vir'd?i:nja 'radd?i]; born 18 July 1978) is an Italian lawyer and politician, the 65th and incumbent mayor of Rome since 2016. Raggi represents the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), and is both the first candidate from that party and the first woman to be elected to Rome's mayoralty.
Video Virginia Raggi
Background
Raggi was born and raised in the Appio-Latino quarter of Rome, and studied law at the Roma Tre University, specialising in judicial and extrajudicial civil law. Raggi was previously a member of local neighborhood boards before joining the Five Star Movement for Rome district XIV in 2011. At the time of her election Raggi lived with her family in the Ottavia suburb in Northern Rome. She is married to fellow M5S member Andrea Severini with whom she has one child, born in 2009.
Maps Virginia Raggi
Election as mayor
In the 2013 municipal election, Raggi was one of four members of the Five Star Movement elected to Rome city council. The maximum term of office lasts five years, but the resignation of mayor Ignazio Marino (a member of the Democratic Party) triggered early elections; Marino was ousted from office after more than half the city's councillors stepped down. Raggi won the closed primary (against Marcello De Vito -- the party's 2013 nominee to the office of mayor -- and other minor candidates) in preparation for the upcoming June 2016 Rome municipal early election. Described by The Economist as "a talented debater", Raggi is the first female mayor of the city. She "promised to fight corruption and bring back Rome's splendor a year after a wide-reaching scandal exposed criminal infiltration in city bidding contracts". and opposed the Rome bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics arguing that the city was in a "delicate moment" pointing out the spiralling deficits in Olympic cities.
Raggi and her party (Five Star Movement, M5S) came in first place in the first round of voting (5 June 2016) in the Rome mayoral election, garnering over 35 percent of the vote. In the second round of voting (19 June 2016), Raggi opposed Roberto Giachetti, a member of the Democratic Party (PD) and Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies in the XVII Legislature, who obtained over 24 percent of the vote in first round. Raggi won the second round with the 67.2 percent of or slightly over 770,000 votes; she is the first woman and the first member of M5S to hold the office of Mayor of Rome.
Mayor of Rome
One of the first acts as mayor was the withdrawal of the 2024 Olympic bid stating that "with 13 billion euros in debt, Rome can't afford taking on more debt to make cathedrals in the desert" Anyway that reason was heavily contested with the accusation to have wasted the chance of renewing the 1960 Olympic infrastructures with little or no expense because the funds would have been provided by the IOC (1.5 billion euros), private investors (910 million euros), and the Italian Government (3,2 billion); according to a study of the University Tor Vergata, the refusal of the Olympics caused a loss of 7.1 billion gross revenue and also an extimated loss of 40,000 job opportunities.
In February 2017, Raggi was put under investigation for two cases of malfeasance in office with regard to decisions on staffing of her private office.
In December 2017 she confirmed that she would not run for another term in 2021, according to an internal rule of her party that allows only two elected terms.
Under her tenure both public transport and waste management have been subject of criticism due to poor quality of passenger service and waste collection: as for the former to date (July 2018) more than 30 buses caught fire since January 2017 because of poor or absent maintenance. The event has become so common that the press reports that every time a bus explodes in Rome the first thing people think to by now is a lack of service of Atac - Rome's public transport company - rather than a terrorist attack. A ballot has been proposed by the Italian Radicals following the petition signed by 33,000 inhabitants of the city to assign via public tender the public transport service to private contractors in order to give a more efficient service but Raggi has postponed it first to June 2018 from the initial date of 4 March and then to an undetermined date in Autumn 2018. To date (July 2018) is still undetermined when the ballot will take place.
As for waste management, far from getting better, the press reports that the average wait time of the waste collection has expanded up to 2-3 weeks with accumulation of garbage out and near of the full waste containers in the street, especially in the peripheral quarters of the city where the press is less likely to investigate; the continuing presence of waste on the streets caused the uncontrolled onset of carrion crows, bugs and rats.
In the most recent (September 2017) opinion poll to measure the approval rating of the local administrators of regions, provinces and cities of Italy, Raggi resulted only the 88th best mayor with only 44.4% of approval.
References
External links
- Official campaign website of Virginia Raggi
Source of article : Wikipedia
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