One in twelve people in Milan is a millionaire — the highest ratio of any city on earth, ahead of New York’s one in twenty-two, with wealthy newcomers drawn by generous tax breaks. For everyone else: rents and house prices spiraling, working people pushed to the suburbs, a public health system in crisis while private clinic chains open across the city. Milan has been governed without interruption by the center-left since 2011. Jacopo Custodi’s point, writing in Jacobin, is that the city’s center left didn’t just watch this happen — it helped.

With Mayor Giuseppe Sala term-limited, Milan votes in spring 2027. The right is betting everything on a law-and-order pitch even as police figures show violent crime falling. The center left hasn’t settled on a candidate, so a primary is likely early next year. That’s where Lorenzo Pacini comes in.

  • Thirty years old, a law graduate on the executive of the district covering Milan’s historic center, a PD member well to the left of the party mainstream.
  • His campaign is called “La Rivoluzione di Milano,” and its logo reworks the biscione — the Visconti serpent-devouring-a-child emblem later borrowed by Berlusconi — so that the serpent is swallowing a portly billionaire in a top hat.
  • He says “socialism,” “working class,” and “class struggle” out loud, in plain concrete language, on the street, on Instagram, and on right-wing TV and radio talk shows.
  • His summer anguriate — watermelon parties, open-air neighborhood gatherings with policy talk and free slices — grew all season. Housing costs, public services, and taxing the rich have since filtered into the city’s wider political debate.
  • He launched MiDecido, a platform where Milanese submit and vote on proposals, framed as building municipal socialism together.

He names three inspirations: Emilio Caldara, Milan’s first Socialist mayor, elected in 1914, who “taxed the rich and built the public services we still enjoy today,” including the municipal transport company; his grandmother, a PCI member who taught in the party’s evening schools for workers; and Ho Chi Minh, whom he calls a great revolutionary and patriot — a choice with a Milanese thread, since Ho appears to have lived in the city in the 1930s under Mussolini, incognito, working as a cook.

He polls at 7 percent in an early-August hypothetical primary, against establishment favorite Mario Calabresi and Schlein ally Pierfrancesco Majorino. That looks fatal until you remember Zohran Mamdani was at 1 percent in the first February 2025 New York poll and most observers doubted him well into the campaign. Pacini himself plays the comparison down — insisting cities have their own particularities, and joking that there are probably more people from Molfetta in Milan than New Yorkers, a nod to the southern Italians who built the city’s working class.

He has a fair claim that Italy doesn’t need to import the model. Before fascism, Socialists governed Milan, Bologna, and hundreds of smaller towns, and “municipal socialism” was their own name for it. After 1945 the Communists ran cities across Italy — Bologna above all, for half a century — building cooperatives, public nurseries, urban planning, and welfare that became one of the party’s strongest arguments for governing. Pacini is reaching back into a tradition the PD spent thirty years trying to forget.

Whether that lands is an open question, but the ground is shifting: a September Ixe survey found 95 percent of Milanese think the city needs to change, and 54 percent want that change to be “radical.”