Palazzo Marino is a powder keg. The signs with the words “resignation”, the boxes for a symbolic move and the basic buzz – mixed with whistles, buuu and screams of “shame” – tell a day that Milan will not forget quickly. A day in which the city council, meeting on the afternoon of July 17, became the scene of an unprecedented political and institutional crisis.
The scene in the classroom: whistles, signs and boxes
It is 16:30 when the session begins. Nine councilors present, Tancredi no. The name that bounces stronger in the corridors of city politics is his own: Giancarlo Tancredi, councilor for urban regeneration, for which the prosecutor asked for house arrest. And then there is him, Beppe Sala. The mayor of Milan is investigated, he discovered him from the newspapers – and this, he says, “is hallucinating”.
Sala was overwhelmed by an investigation that touches the discovered nerves of the city: urban planning, cement, pharaonic projects, metropolitan nodes. According to the Milanese magistrates, behind some key choices there would have been undue pressures and piloted appointments. In the classroom, the city councilors of the League and brothers of Italy stage a noisy protest: they raise, invade the center of the classroom, raise signs and rest boxes on the desks. “I’m by room, so it can start the move,” they say. Meanwhile, from the public they rain shout. “At home!”, “You ruined the city!”.
The accusations: false statements and pressures on the landscape commission
At the center of the investigation there are 74 names, an intertwining of technicians, politicians, entrepreneurs and urban planners. Two crimes disputed to the first citizen: false declarations regarding the appointment of the president of the landscape commission, Giuseppe Marinoni, and undue induction, in particular linked to the “Pirellino” project – one of the key dowels of the Milanese urban transformation signed by the architect Stefano Boeri and by the entrepreneur Manfredi Catella.
According to the prosecutors, Marinoni would not have been independent: a “blackmailed” figure, they write, who would have acted under pressure from the room, Tancredi, of the general manager Malangone and the entrepreneurs involved. The result? Strategic projects that would have taken shape in a opaque way, “exploiting” even the patronage of the Marinoni studio on the metropolitan doors, to facilitate a hidden business plan in the peripheral nodes of Milan.
The defense of the mayor: “Never spoken with Marinoni”
“They accuse me of pressure on a person I don’t even have the phone number.” Sala defends herself thus, in an interview with Corriere della Sera. He is tried, tell his councilors, but he has no intention of resigning. He speaks of “unacceptable methods”, accuses the judiciary of having put him on the cross media even before even officially.
On the Pirellino-the building-symbol, abandoned for years-Sala is clear: “We sold it in 2019 and we are still still. Six years have passed and the works have never started. Other than induction”.
Tancredi ready to leave, the majority holds around the mayor
In the meantime, Tancredi says he is ready to take a step back, to resign “for a sense of responsibility”. In the council, this morning, the councilors expressed full solidarity in the room. But the climate remains heavy.
What happens now
The mayor will return to the classroom on Monday, this time to speak. He will report to the directors, he will try to reappear a majority that, at least on paper, continues to support him. But the crack is deep. And the judicial earthquake – with its epicenter in the heart of the Milanese urban planning machine – risks leaving political shocks for months.
