Virginia Raggi has scored two remarkable firsts with one blow – on Sunday she became the first woman mayor of Rome and she handed her party, the Five Star Movement, its biggest municipal victory yet.
Party colleague, business graduate Chiara Appendino (32), did likewise in Turin. A maverick Independent retained Naples. Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, becomes her party's highest profile figure following the retirement of its founder, the comedian Beppe Grillo.
In the process, Raggi and Appendino also dealt a double blow to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's twice-second-placed Democratic Party (PD) and potentially to the latter's hopes of reforming the sclerotic Italian political system by severely curtailing the powers and mandate of the Senate in a referendum this autumn.
“I don’t believe this was a protest vote,” a defensive Renzi told reporters, while acknowledging that “it’s a vote of change ...Those who won were able to better interpret the need for change”. It’s a distinction without a difference, as he will certainly discover.
Admittedly the PD took Milan and Bologna but the Five Star Movement also notched up victories in run-off races in 17 smaller towns, testimony to voters’s continued appetite for the unconventional party’s determination to attack both the incompetence and corruption which have mired Italian local government.
The performance of Raggi in the near-impossible task of setting to rights Rome – in debt to the tune of €13 billion – will be seen as a key litmus test for the potential of the party (now polling over 25 per cent) in government. Does it do problem-solving? Her inexperience was clearly seen as an advantage by voters disillusioned with any candidate tainted by office.
Polls suggest the anti-establishment party could beat the unpopular Renzi in a general election, not due until 2018, and many – across the political spectrum and in his own party – look on his Senate referendum as an opportunity to get rid of him before then.
An opinion poll on Sunday put backing for the proposed constitutional reform at 28.6 per cent. Opposition was at 27.2 per cent, and undecideds on an ominous 44.2 per cent.