Massimo Zedda attacks coldly, Paolo Truzzu reacts hotly. It's a heated clash—with venomous stings—between the current mayor of Cagliari (Progressisti, recently allied with the Democratic Party) and his predecessor from the Brothers of Italy.
Zedda spoke yesterday from the Leopolda stage. In his conversation with host Matteo Renzi , he discussed the situation he says he found Palazzo Bacaredda and the city in after five years of a rival administration. He said he left the municipality in 2019 "which was a little gem and I found it quite battered" by a mayor "from the Brothers of Italy" because "it's not true that we're all the same. Compared to 2011, when I inherited it from a Forza Italia mayor, I found the situation objectively difficult; I struggled more, also because there's an overall impoverishment," Zedda concluded, "but now we have a healthy municipality, with zero debt."
Truzzu waited only a few hours before replying. And the jab comes in regarding the "jewels": "I don't know what jewelry Zedda is accustomed to, Audemars Piguet watches aside, but he probably forgot that among the many legacies he left behind was a city buried under garbage, overrun by meaningless bike paths, and with projects so flawed as to be unworkable: like those of Viale Sant'Avendrace and Via Campo Scipione."
The reference is to the watch that the then mayor of Sel received as a gift in 2012 from the extremely wealthy Sultan of Oman, Qaboos Bin Said, who was then visiting Cagliari . A jewel—which, among other things, also tells the time—worth over 58,000 euros, which Zedda—after claiming to have received it as Massimo Zedda, a citizen and not as Massimo Zedda's mayor —donated (or returned) to the Municipality 11 years later, just as Truzzu was governing Via Roma.
But the former mayor's response isn't just a low-ball: "After the evident failure of his administration, Zedda is desperately seeking new candidates, perhaps even in the general election, so as to abandon Cagliari for the second time before the end of the legislature." So desperate, adds Truzzu, "that not only did he hastily shelve the Progressives' experience by seeking political asylum in the Democratic Party, but he also went to Matteo Renzi's court to shift old and new responsibilities for the city's conditions and to rave about little gems.
According to the Melonian, "when you're almost halfway through a council term, citizens deserve more than a story about the past: they deserve a clean, decent, safe, well-maintained, and functioning city. The issue isn't who left what to whom. The point is much simpler: today, Cagliari is governed by Massimo Zedda. And Massimo Zedda must answer for the conditions of Cagliari today."