Assessment 1: the electoral campaign of Roberto Tavani

Obama style: door to door.
The electoral campaign of Roberto Tavani.
Municipio XVII Roma

This photographic essay document the electoral campaign of Roberto Tavani,
It was an original campaign, run on a shoestring, pushed by a vision that politics should be closer to the citizens rather than to political parties logics.

Background to the Election.
The Town and Municipal election held in April 2008 came as a surprise. The national government fell in January 2008. The incumbent major of Roma, Walter Veltroni - head of the newly formed Partito Democratico (centre-left) - left his post to run as Prime Minister. Quite unexpectedly, citizens of Roma were summoned to vote for the town administration. Equally unexpectedly Roberto Tavani, a town councillor (Environment, Sport, Culture) in Municipio XVII for Democratic Party had to step down from his role as councillor and run his electoral campaign side by side with his institutional committments.

Municipio XVII
Municipio XVII is located north of the Vatican. It has different souls: close to St Peter is the bourgeois Prati, moving further north there are more popular, middle/working class neighbourhoods. The campaign of Tavani mostly happened in these popular parts, by the local markets, the playgrounds. This is where Rome becomes an interesting mix: a bit of a village – people rooted in the area, talking lively in their strong accent; a bit of a city – large buildings with the imperial allure of fascist social housing.

The campaign
I stumbled in Roberto Tavani by chance. I was lucky because he run his campaign very differently from many. First of all, the “municipio” is the only government body for which electors can still vote a candidate of choice: at all the other levels people vote “blocked” lists of candidates appointed by the parties. So, at this level, personality mattered
Another difference is that many people would rely on billboards, leaflets and basically on lot of money to run their campaign, so the choice of Roberto Tavani to make a low cost campaign and base it on face to face interaction with people was an interesting one. It was a campaign on the road, and I had walked for hours following him in action.
Finally, Roberto Tavani is a bit of an outsider in the Partito Democratico. He feels that politics should change. He believes more in dialogue with citizens than being part of political games. So his campaign only rarely overlapped with what was organized by the party: he preferred to be in the streets rather than in the party offices or in more institutionalized electoral venues and stalls.
Roberto was helped by Lorenza, which worked as a secretary and PR and also accompanied him to talk to people. A couple of boys also volunteered to dispatch door to door electoral material with their scooters, to the supporters requiring it.
Finally, his former responsibilities as town councillor (Culture, Environment, Sport) meant that his campaign revolved around art galleries, theatres, open spaces, gardens: a beautiful backdrop capturing many facets of this part of Roma.

How did the election go?
The democratic party won the election in the Municipio and Roberto Tavani received the highest number of votes in the municipio (over 700 votes, meaning, 1/60 of the voters wrote his name on the ballot out of a choice of 300 candidates). He is again councillor. The democratic party did not equally well in broader Roma, and the candidate of the Right, Gianni Alemanno, won the elections.

About the multimedia project.
The multimedia project presents a different set of pictures from the portfolio. Pictures which would not work in a portfolio became essential here to accompany the narrative of the campaign by Roberto Tavani. The occasion in which the audio clip were recorded was a visit after the elections, when he looked back at the campaign as I gave him the pictures I took. The song “This is not America” was proposed as a soundtrack by Roberto, not only because he likes it. It is also a cheeky remark about the admiration for a dreamlike Kennedy America by the leadership of the Democratic party. The title "Like Obama" came from a joking comment Roberto made while walking around the town.