Salis fits that brief almost too well. She is not, strictly speaking, a politician: she has never sat in parliament, has no previous political career, and entered Genoa\u2019s city hall only in May 2025. Her sporting record includes two Olympic appearances and a spell as vice president of the Italian National Olympic Committee. As a \u201ccivic\u201d figure with no party affiliation and no left-wing past to defend, she offers a blank surface onto which everyone can project their preferred image.<\/p>\n
According to journalistic reconstructions, between late 2023 and early 2024 her name circulated inside Forza Italia\u00a0\u2014 the late billionaire Silvio Berlusconi\u2019s center-right party\u00a0\u2014 as a possible candidate, first for the presidency of the Liguria region and then for Genoa\u2019s city hall. A more recent reconstruction<\/a> in Il Fatto Quotidiano, a newspaper usually critical of the political establishment and absent from the chorus of praise surrounding Salis, adds another piece of the picture: in 2024, Salis dined in Genoa with her husband, the film director Fausto Brizzi, and Giovanni Toti, then president of Liguria, a few months before Toti would be placed under house arrest in the corruption scandal that hit him and his right-wing regional government.<\/p>\n After the Toti scandal, the route into center-right politics that had once seemed available to Salis appeared to have closed off, and she was ultimately elected as an independent with the backing of a broad center-left coalition. Marco Bucci\u00a0\u2014 the center-right former mayor of Genoa, whom Salis succeeded, and now president of Liguria\u00a0\u2014 put the case most plainly<\/a>: \u201cShe\u2019s a good candidate, she could have been one of ours.\u201d<\/p>\n Moreover, in October 2023, Salis quietly registered a personal political brand, \u201cFuturo Democratico,\u201d that has since gone unused\u00a0\u2014 a placeholder party kept in the drawer. The Fatto Quotidiano editor Marco Travaglio has compared the move to Berlusconi quietly registering his own party name decades ago even as the media tycoon ruled out any political ambitions.<\/p>\n Salis\u2019s personal network tilts the same way. Her husband, Brizzi, is a fixture of Rome\u2019s commercial cinema and television world. Her communications consultant is Marco Agnoletti\u00a0\u2014 Renzi\u2019s spin doctor during the latter\u2019s 2014 takeover of the PD, the operation later symbolized by Renzi\u2019s infamous \u201cEnrico stai sereno\u201d reassurance to then Prime Minister Enrico Letta weeks before Letta was pushed out. Some commentators have already begun describing the construction of Salis\u2019s national profile as a textbook reprise of the same play: public reassurances of loyalty to PD\u2019s Schlein alongside methodical work behind the scenes to assemble the alliance that will displace her. <\/p>\n Renzi himself has openly encouraged Salis\u2019s national ambitions. Carlo Calenda, leader of the centrist Azione, has already declared that if the campo largo chooses Salis as its leader, his party would be ready to join the coalition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Salis fits that brief almost too well. She is not, strictly speaking, a politician: she has never sat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":{"0":"post-14860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-italy","8":"tag-italy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}