Associated Press
ROME — The Rome city council backed Mayor Virginia Raggi’s decision to reject the capital’s bid for the 2024 Olympics on Thursday.
The motion passed easily as expected since Raggi’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement holds a majority on the city council.
There were 30 votes in favor of withdrawing the bid, and 12 votes against the motion.
The 5-Star Movement holds 29 of the 48 council places, and all 29 voted in support of the mayor’s rejection. There was also one supporting vote from an opposition party. Six council members were absent.
The vote leaves only Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest, Hungary, in the running for the 2024 Games. The International Olympic Committee will decide on the host city in September 2017.
It’s the second time in four years that Rome has been forced to withdraw an Olympic bid. In 2012, then-premier Mario Monti scrapped the city’s bid for the 2020 Olympics because of financial concerns.
The latest withdrawal is another clear signal that the IOC still has a lot of work to do to convince cities that hosting the games is a boon and not a burden.
Voters in Hamburg rejected the German city’s 2024 bid in a referendum. Boston also dropped out last year amid a lack of public and political support and was replaced as the U.S. candidate by Los Angeles.
Under previous mayor Ignazio Marino, the Rome bid was approved by the city assembly last year with 38 votes in favor and only six against.
Italian Premier Matteo Renzi was a strong supporter of the 2024 bid.
But Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer who was elected in June as Rome’s first female mayor, cited cost concerns and expected budget overflows as her reasons for rejecting the bid. She called the candidacy “irresponsible” for a city that can barely collect its trash and keep up other basic public services.
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