For several months, the city of Rome has been undergoing major transformations in preparation for this year’s Jubilee. Billions in public funds, most of which have directly benefited construction companies, have been hastily allocated to turn the city center into a showcase aimed at welcoming millions of tourists, ensuring massive profits for both small and large real estate owners, hotel chains, as well as the restaurant industry and the Vatican itself (which owns thousands of properties in our city, including accommodations, private clinics and other types of businesses). Hundreds of projects have mainly affected central neighborhoods, leaving their residents and commuters trapped. These projects, moreover, have often been revised due to cost and implementation delays, leading to a result far removed from the one promised by Mayor Gualtieri and his administration – just consider the project for the forecourt in front of Termini station and its actual execution.
The Jubilee has inevitably led to a marked decline in the quality of life for the bulk of the workers and popular strata in our city. Rent hikes, driven by the interests of landlords, have caused rents to soar and evictions to rise due to over-tenancy, all while legislation to regulate short-term rentals remains absent. This, combined with the ongoing sell-off of public housing, has displaced the working class not only from central neighborhoods but also from areas once considered more suburban or semi-central.
While the municipality has chosen to focus on upgrading some of the city’s streets and squares (mostly in neighborhoods most attractive to national and international investors), public transportation has seen no such improvements, despite the continuous rise in daily and weekly ticket prices set by the municipal and regional administrations.
Under the logic of “big events”, which increasingly dominates the purpose of urban change, the Jubilee is turning our city into an exclusive city, where public real estate is sold off to large investment funds to be transformed into large hotels, luxury condominiums or short-term rentals, while working-class neighborhoods are increasingly cut off from these major changes, receiving only neglect and repression.
Meanwhile, these suburbs and working-class areas are increasingly deprived of essential services such as affordable housing, public transportation, healthcare, culture and sports-services that should be free and accessible to all.
In light of the repercussions that the Jubilee and the policies of local and national government are having on workers and popular strata, the Communist Front demands:
- the end of public investment for the Jubilee: the Catholic Church has an immense wealth in our country and therefore does not require any intervention from the Italian state for the organization of its events;
- the redirection of funds toward projects that are truly useful to Romans: these include the strengthening and making public transportation free, securing the right to housing through the maintenance of public housing, the refinancing of public housing plans, the development of an efficient public health care system throughout all areas of the city, and the redevelopment of Rome’s working-class neighborhoods, which have been abandoned for far too long;
- regulation of short-term rentals and a cap on rents: events such as the Jubilee offer small and large landlords an excuse to raise rents or convert apartments into tourist rentals. It is time to say enough to policies that prioritize the interests of landlords and speculators.
As communists, we view our struggle as not merely opposed to events like the Jubilee, but to the broader urban model being imposed, akin to what has already happened in Milan following the EXPO 2015. That event led to the cannibalization of the Lombard city by real estate funds and speculators of all kinds – a model promoted across the entire bourgeois political spectrum, marking a full continuity between the center-right and center-left parties.
For us, these immediate demands are inseparable from the broader revolutionary struggle of communists for a new society, for socialism-communism, in which the development of our cities and neighborhoods is determined not by the interests of a minority of exploiters but by the well-being of workers and their families, the unemployed, students from the popular strata and pensioners. A society where there is no place in public life for religious doctrine or billion-dollar investments in events related to it, nor where priests and church hierarchies control a major portion of the country’s wealth.
The need to fight against the Jubilee and the logic of “big events”, which have always served as a cover for securing billion-dollar profits for the usual speculators, highlights the necessity of building, in Rome and across the country, that Communist Party capable of embodying and advancing the demands of the working class. This is why our struggle cannot afford to ignore this objective.
