The little video that Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome, Posted on Friday at noon on Twitteris only 19 seconds long. It should be an invitation to the citizens of the city to adhere to the strict exit restrictions that have been in place for two weeks due to the Corona crisis in Italy.
Good idea actually. The mayor gives courage to the people in the city. She helps keep morals high with haunted words. She says that it is a difficult time, but that we will get through it together. Things that politicians say in such a situation.
Raggi, 41, took a different approach. She’s mad. “It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work,” says the mayor, who belongs to the left-wing populist Cinque Stelle movement. More respect is needed now – and that you act as a community. The tweet above the video also reads: “There are people who still go out as if nothing had happened”. One has to protect particularly vulnerable people from infection. “State a casa! State a casa!” Says Raggi twice at the end of her statement. Stay at home!
The trouble is: Raggi is standing outside in a park – and doing exactly what people in Italy are not supposed to be doing at the moment.
The already strict curfew was tightened again this Friday. The government now expressly forbids citizens to go to parks and other green spaces. Any trips to weekend houses are also prohibited. Sport is only allowed “in the immediate vicinity of your own home”. The police in Rome checked compliance with the rules more closely at the weekend than on the previous days. People in Italy are only allowed to leave the house to get food or medicine or to go to work.
Exit restrictions also apply in some federal states
The reactions to Raggi’s video are accordingly devastating. More than 1,700 comments had accumulated by Saturday afternoon. Most of them ridicule, malice or abuse. “Brilliant. You stand in the park and tell people to stay at home,” writes one user, for example. Another thinks further: “Tomorrow we are expecting a video that explains to us how important it is to use the zebra crossing in which you can be seen while you are running across the city motorway”.
