Under the neon light of a back room of the labor exchange in Paris, adjoining the amphitheater where awaited him, Wednesday, November 17, his expatriate French and Italian friends gathered for an evening of support, the man seems weary of the weight weighing on his shoulders. That of no longer being simply a man among men, coming from a small corner of the poor south of Italy, but a living symbol: saint and martyr for his supporters, scarecrow and crook for his adversaries, he who had without doubt, at first, just tried to do well.
Domenico Lucano, 63, known by the diminutive of Mimmo, once enjoyed the glory and praise of the supporters of the humanist discourse on migration issues, for his original model of welcoming exiles. On September 30, the former mayor of Riace, from 2004 to 2018, was sentenced to a crushing thirteen-year prison sentence, convicted of criminal conspiracy for the purposes of irregular immigration, fraudulent practices, embezzlement of public property and abuse of public office. The justice also asks him to return 500,000 euros of public aid received by the municipality.
In this locality which has less than 2,000 inhabitants, he had favored the integration of migrants in the name of the principle of unconditional reception but at the cost of certain circumventions of the law which have earned him today legal disputes generally considered as disproportionate, especially since no one suspects the former mayor of any personal enrichment.
“My situation is legally inexplicable, summarizes Mr. Lucano, and I no longer expect anything from Italian justice as an institution. “
He is criticized in particular for having given his approval to sham marriages and for having entrusted, outside the formalities to cooperatives linked to migrants, the responsibility of collecting waste in his city. He is now awaiting his appeal trial. “This conviction was a blow to the heart, testifies Mimmo, whose pain shows through a calm mask. I assume that I am out of the law, but legality and justice are two different things. Legality is the instrument of power and power can be unjust. “
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For Mr. Lucano, this conviction is fundamentally unrelated to the facts with which he is accused, and, even with hindsight, he explains that he would not have changed anything in his methods. The problem, according to the former mayor, is elsewhere. “Through this judgment, the authorities are trying to delegitimize everything that we have accomplished, a model which is the antithesis of what this extreme right, which is rising everywhere, animated by hatred, wants. They are trying to kill an idea ”, he judges while in the adjoining room the audience is made to wait by playing a Bella ciao a touch of nostalgia and other songs from the classical repertoire of the Italian left.
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