The center-left candidate for Mayor in the Venice municipal elections calls out the “failure” of Brugnaro’s policies: “Shops are social institutions. They need tax breaks.”
[Ed. Note: recent news has reported an alarming increase in store closures in Mestre – the PAM grocery store on Corso del Popolo is about to close, and in popular shopping areas like Piazza Ferretto and Ca’ Mestre up to a third of the shops are now empty. Mayoral candidates Andrea Martella and Simone Venturini have both recently opened campaign offices in Mestre located in vacant stores. Meanwhile, the area around the train station remains a hub for drug dealing and consumption, and Mestre now leads Italy in heroin overdose deaths.]
March 31, 2026
Andrea Martella, Mayoral candidate for the center-left coalition, gets straight to the heart of the matter: “We need tax incentives for commerce and neighborhood police for safety”, and accuses the outgoing administration of failing on both objectives.
“To revitalize Mestre and the mainland, concrete measures are needed immediately,” Martella explained at the end of a day packed with meetings, discussions, and handshakes. “Tax incentives to reopen shops, neighborhood police, urban regeneration plans, increased public presence, and discussions with trade unions, consumer representatives, and local stakeholders to develop effective responses to combat degradation, insecurity, and commercial desertification within a few months. This is where we want to start, because safety and local commerce must be addressed together: when shop windows close, daily life also closes, and the local area becomes more fragile. All of this is also the response to the failure—particularly visible in Mestre—of eleven years of the Brugnaro-Venturini administration. The result of their policies is there for all to see: the perception of insecurity is growing, and at the same time, local commerce is weakening.
According to Martella, who has lived in Mestre for a long time, “the city doesn’t need further announcements, and even less continuity with the choices made in recent years: it needs a public presence, care for the urban space, and concrete responses to citizens and workers.”
The center-left candidate suggests a line of action based on integrated policies: “Safety is a common good and a fundamental right: it is built with territorial control and stable presences, right down to the neighborhood policeman. But it also requires a functioning city, with local services, lighting and maintenance, regeneration of deteriorated spaces, and a response to social fragility.”
And in this sense, the connection with commerce is structural: “The neighborhood store isn’t just about the economy: it’s about social protection,” the mayoral candidate reflects. “We need a strategy to combat desertification, with a permanent roundtable with trade unions and consumer representatives, a steering committee that unites development and urban planning, an observatory on vacant premises, but also economic measures, tax breaks, and incentives that concretely help shops stay open and, at the same time, support Venetian families against the high cost of living. Defending local commerce means defending community, jobs, and livability.”
“The mainland,” Martella concludes, “doesn’t deserve resignation or propaganda. It deserves a real transformation: safety, commerce, and urban quality must be addressed together, with seriousness and responsibility.”
Source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre
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