Afragola – The Pannone era is over. Fourteen city councilors, including opposition members and (surprisingly) several members of the same majority, simultaneously submitted their resignations before a notary, bringing down the center-right mayor after just three and a half years in office.
The news was made official by Antonio Iazzetta, former mayoral candidate in 2021 and one of the signatories, along with Giacinto Baia, Raffaele Botta, Antonio Caiazzo, Vincenzo De Stefano, Gennaro Giustino, Crescenzo Russo, and Marianna Salierno for the opposition, and majority councilors Giuseppe Affinito, Assunta Di Maso, Maria Carmina Sepe, Giuseppe Migliore, Sara Tralice, and Benito Zanfardino.
The resignations were filed with the City Council today: the procedure will automatically begin for the Prefect of Naples to appoint a special commissioner. Afragola will return to the polls in spring 2026, with the election campaign effectively already underway.
The dramatic turn of events comes just days after the Pannone front's regional election success, with the election of Michela Rostan on the Brothers of Italy ticket and the strong showing of fellow candidate Nicholas Esposito. This triumph wasn't enough to prop up an increasingly fragmented majority, especially after the arrest of former mayor and senator Vincenzo Nespoli—a longtime "director" of Afragola's politics—for escaping house arrest.
"The mayor tried everything, even resigning first and then withdrawing them, but he was unable to reunite a divided majority bereft of Nespoli's leadership," Iazzetta commented.
Now it's up to the commissioner to try to restore order to a municipality that has shown too many limitations: from the risk of financial collapse to the management of PNRR funds, to a PUC (Public Construction and Urban Planning Scheme) that doesn't meet the city's real needs. Then the decision will be made back to the citizens, who will have to decide who will be able to repair the damage of recent years.
Afragola thus enters the limbo of administration, yet another in its recent history, awaiting a new political season that already promises to be heated.
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Comments (2)
You did nothing
It's a real shame that all this happened in Afragola. People sometimes don't understand the difficult decisions politicians have to make, but there should have been better plans for the city's future. I don't know if a commissioner can solve the problems.