Giancarlo Cito, former mayor of Taranto, has died. He was the pioneer of the populism-telecracy binomial of Italy in the nineties

He was a pioneer of telecracy, connecting the popularity of his television, AT6, with a rough populist proposal (superimposable to that of the current Le Penist right): Giancarlo Cito, television entrepreneur, mayor of Taranto and member of parliament, passed away at 89. He had been ill for some time.

His rise to prominence began in 1993 , when - with the reform of the law that introduced direct elections in the municipalities - he was elected mayor against all odds with his primitive "Southern Action League", defeating in the run-off his rival supported by the left, "the magistrate lent to politics" Gaetano Minervini. "L'Unità" immediately defined him as a "tele-preacher", almost foreseeing the role that television (and Berlusconism) would have in the years to follow in the new balances after the devastation of Tangentopoli.

A surveyor in life, then a building contractor before launching himself into the galaxy of free networks, in his youth he had been a dealer for the MSI, one of the “National Volunteers”, the network of activists organized by Alberto Rossi to guard Giorgio Almirante’s rallies. His political proposal was a mix of anti-system slogans and primordial anti-immigrant battles, with a “law and order” jelly (in the campaign to clear out the far-left social center) that did not sit well with his unscrupulous relationships with local crime (he was convicted of external complicity in mafia association with a final sentence for his relationships with the dangerous local clans led by the Modeo family, and spent several years in prison). Some of his suggestions (removing benches in parks where illegal immigrants camped out, or live interventions on his TV to repair a fountain that had been out of order for years) anticipated the current social version of live politics. The clamor of his initiatives and an intense relationship with the suburbs of Taranto also guaranteed him election to the Chamber in 1996.

He also tried in vain to run for mayor of Milan , first showing up in Mantua with an anti-Lega march and then getting only a zero point in the Milanese municipal elections (in 1997) with the slogan “I want to tarantize Milan”.

The emergence of southern radicalism in the form of a league had had some experiments before AT6, but Cito managed to give it a minimal organizational form by availing himself of the collaboration of Pietro Cerullo, a historic leader of Giovane Italia, whom he appointed as his deputy mayor and whom he also elected to the Chamber in 1994, winning in the single-member constituency of Taranto.

Nothing remains of this experience: the attempt to pass on this national-popular tradition to his son Mario did not have any noteworthy electoral results.

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