Susanna Ceccardi

In march 2020 Ceccardi was proposed as candidate for the center-right coalition to the 2020 Tuscan regional election.

In May 2019 she was elected to the European Parliament. She served as mayor of Cascina from June 2016 to June 2019.

In April 2019, she became an official candidate for her party at the 2019 European Parliament election She was elected with 48,239 preferences. becoming the youngest MEP of her party. Her former deputy Dario Rollo became mayor after she accepted her role of MEP.

During the 2019-20 COVID-19 pandemic she organized with party colleagues Gian Marco Centinaio (former minister of agriculture) and Gianna Gambaccini (a doctor and local assessore in Pisa) a "rescue expedition" traveling by bus from Italy to Barcelona where they collected 46 Italian citizens (mostly from Tuscany.) blocked in the Canary Islands with no direct flight to Italy because of the increasing local travel restrictions and reduction of flights and routes. The tourists were visited by Gambaccini before the start of the travel, and equipped with protective masks.

After the good performance of the possible allied parties at the 2019 European elections, Ceccardi declared herself as a possible candidate for the president of Tuscany at the incoming regional elections of 2020. However, possible allies criticized the weak performance of the center-right coalition at the runoff votings of the 2019 municipal elections under her strategical leadership and criticisms of her activism emerged also inside her own party.

In April 2019, during Liberation Day, she expressed her critical views about the less debated aspects of the Italian resistance movement.

In March 2019 she made public that she is expecting a baby with her partner Andrea Barabotti from Massa , due in September 2019. She expressed the possibility to name her future daughter Kinzica after Kinzica de' Sismondi, a medieval heroine who according to the legend it is said to have defended the town of Pisa from the invasion of the Saracens. Kinzika was born in Pisa on September, 28th

The result was not considered local and was seen as a key example of the political shift fuelled by the topic of immigration which later occurred at the national general election in 2018.

Susanna Ceccardi's role was considered crucial for the elections in the local constitutencies of her assessors Edoardo Ziello and Rosellina Sbrana in March 2018 to the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, respectively, and for the victory of the right-wing candidate Michele Conti at the mayoral election in the bigger neighboring comune of Pisa few months later. In Autumn 2018 she was appointed special commissioner (head) of the party in Tuscany.

In September 2018 she joined the staff of Salvini once he had become the Italian Minister of the Interior.

In 2016 she obtained at the Cascina mayoral election 28.4% in the first round and 50.3% in the run-off, while her party got 21.3%. Immigration was a core topic of the campaign.

In 2016 she gave honorary citizenship to Magdi Cristiano Allam, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity and is noted for his criticism of Islamic extremism. She opposes the construction of mosques and, in exchange for the celebration of the Eid al-Fitr in a public space by the local Senegalese community, she required that they "firmly condemned" all acts of violence induced by Islamic fundamentalism.

In 2015 she was a candidate at the Tuscan regional election but did not get a council seat.

She was elected at the municipal council of Cascina in 2011 and she participated as a regular guest in the political talk show Announo on the national channel LA7.

The paternal branch of her family originated from the hamlet of Vaglie in the comune of Ligonchio and she is a distant cousin through her paternal grandfather of the singer Iva Zanicchi. Her family was left-wing but her parents moved their vote to the Northern League in the 1990s.

At the time her victory interrupted 70 years of leftwing local leadership and Cascina became the first large municipality won by Lega Nord Toscana in the region and the second in general after Bagni di Lucca in the 1990s. in a region which is a traditional left stronghold. She was also the only member of Lega Nord elected mayor in the whole region before Siena, Pisa and Massa followed suit in the June 2018 local elections.

Susanna Ceccardi (born 19 March 1987) is an Italian politician.