“I'd like to but I can't”, he says in an interview with L'Espresso which will be released on Sunday. Beppe Sala, mayor of Milan, mister Expo and now also mister Olympic Games, launches the idea of a new center-left party (“The Democratic Party is no longer enough: it is old and contentious”) and not even too covertly does not exclude his candidacy as national leader in the future. After all, the former manager is more than ever on the launch pad: after the triumph of Expo 2015 (and the resolution of the related judicial problems), which changed the face of Milan, Sala managed to get himself elected mayor, making the Lombard capital is the only large city left in the hands of the Democratic Party, and now it has also brought home – together with Coni, the Government, the Lombardy Region and the Veneto Region – another great event. The 2026 Olympics in Milan-Cortina will take place when the mandate as mayor has already ended, but the long wave of this success could lead to Sala being reconfirmed, or even something bigger.
In a political framework where the center-left struggles to find the key to the problem amidst the national-sovereign storm, the mayor of Milan is probably one of the few figures to whom well-defined and recognized successful operations can be attributed. Operations, those of the Expo (which Sala managed) and the Olympics (which Sala won and will co-manage), which not only have they produced and will produce economic and image benefits, but which easily remain imprinted in the popular imagination, in an electoral key. Sala's success crosses the whole country, from North to South. If in fact the alliance with the North and the League (in the figures of the governors Fontana and Zaia and also of the undersecretary Giorgetti) was decisive for bringing home the 2026 Winter Games. , it is also true that Sala would have been ready to organize them as well with the Turin of the pentasellata Appendino (with whom he has set a meeting in mid-July to hypothesize a collaboration on the Olympics and ATP Finals tennis) and that the understanding was also important with Rome and Giovanni Malagò's Coni.
Bipartisan and also Southernist. The Sala axis has actually shifted its center of gravity towards the South, through an increasingly close link with three southern axes: this year there was an unexpected collaboration with the mayor of Naples Luigi De Magistris on the theme of culture and of integration, triggered by the unfortunate episode of racism during an Inter-Naples match at the San Siro against the blue footballer Koulibaly, with whom the mayor of Milan (interista) had immediately expressed solidarity. Furthermore, as evidenced by the activities of some members of his staff, it seems that Sala also gets along well with the president of the Campania region Vincenzo De Luca and above all with the president of Confindustria Vincenzo Boccia. Sala's rise as a possible national leader has this imprinting: dialogue with everyone, starting with the business world.
