Tag: Pomigliano d’Arco

Then he became the son. For years, Mr. Di Maio, a 32-year-old leader of Italy’s populist coalition government, attacked his political enemies by seeking to stain them with the alleged misconduct of their fathers. Recent news reports have charged that his father paid employees off the books and illegally built on his land outside Naples. On Monday, the elder Di Maio, who dabbled in post-fascist politics, posted a painful video on his Facebook page that was subsequently spread across Five Star social media. “I’m sorry for my son Luigi, who they are trying to attack,” he says, insisting his son knew nothing of his misdeeds and praising his “honesty, transparency and courage.” He demands that critics “leave my family alone” but argues that he had no choice but to hire workers off the books. Before Five Star came to power, its main target was Matteo Renzi of the Democratic Party, a former prime minister. “I’m convinced that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons,” Mr. Renzi wrote on Facebook after the program about Mr. Di Maio’s father aired. Mr. Renzi’s father recently wrote on Facebook that if he had done what Mr. Di Maio’s father had, Five Star “would already have launched an appeal on social networks for the return of the death penalty.” (This week, La Verità, another newspaper close to the populist government, alleged new improprieties, prompting Tiziano Renzi to deny that he and his son paid paperboys off the books when they operated a paper route decades ago in Florence.) “I’d like to look in the face Mr. Antonio Di Maio, the father of Luigi, and say I hope that he does not go through what his son and his friends put my father and my family through,” she said. Then the left-leaning newspaper la Repubblica published reports about his father illegally expanding their childhood home in Pomigliano D’Arco.

The community of the beleaguered South San Antonio Independent School District failed its children by voting down a proposed school tax increase. The failure to generate new tax revenue will likely result in an additional 30 positions on the chopping block. In 2013 Di Maio ran for office the Five Star Movement way: by posting his own candidacy online. Why should Luigi di Maio have a degree to become Prime Minister? But if di Maio is chosen to lead the next government after the election, this will become famous as the hometown of the youngest ever prime minister of Italy. In the last national election five years ago, di Maio was one of 160 citizens with little or no experience in politics who gained a seat in parliament. If Beppe Grillo is the movement’s mouthpiece, and Di Maio its face, the brains was the late Gianroberto Casaleggio. “Whoever manages the portal has access to all data, to everything that happens within the Five Star Movement, above all the votes,” he explained. He was already retired when the board, in a last-ditch effort to save the school district from state control in 2014, brought him in after having had four superintendents in two years. The state’s failure to act has prompted more than half of the state’s 1,000-plus public school districts to seek voter approval through tax ratification elections to make ends meet.