Student elections at Poliba: AUP wins again this time

The ULISSE POLITECNICO ASSOCIATION, following in the footsteps of previous years, wins almost all the available seats. AU returns to the Department Council with one representative. UDU obtains 4, La Volpe 10, and 3 others in the Student Council. On the doctoral candidates front, SIDRI wins all the available seats

22 May 2026

There was the Azione Universitaria factor, a historic youth right-wing group, which returned to the field after years of absence at the Polytechnic. And there was also the debut of UDU – Unione degli Universitari, an acronym known in other academic contexts, which suggested a repositioning in the free spaces on the left. Despite these two new elements in this election campaign, which were not marginal in terms of opportunity and political significance, the elections of the student representatives of the Polytechnic University of Bari ended with a result already seen in recent years: a clear victory for Associazione Ulisse Politecnico, the group founded in 2014 after an internal debate within Azione Universitaria, repositioned itself as independent and non-partisan and then became the majority force in student representation at the Polytechnic. In this round as well, AUP won all the seats available in the central bodies and almost all those available in the departmental councils.

However, the other lists also achieved significant results. Azione Universitaria celebrates its return to the Polytechnic, succeeding in electing one of its own representatives to the departmental council. Also in the departments, UDU wins 4 seats in as many councils, and La Volpe – another “young” list, founded two years ago at the Polytechnic – confirms its leadership in the Arcod Department of Architecture, Construction and Design (the one with the highest turnout) and grows in numbers compared with the previous round, obtaining 10 seats in the departments and 4 in the Students’ Council. On the doctoral candidates’ front, the Sidri list, Società italiana del dottorato di ricerca, wins all the seats available for the category.

At the end of the vote, held online yesterday and the day before yesterday, a total of 4,787 voters out of 11,631 eligible voters had cast their ballots, with a turnout of 41.6%. In the previous election, turnout had been 45.6%. Students of the Polytechnic (and doctoral candidates, where provided) voted to elect their representatives to the Academic Senate and the Board of Directors, the Students’ Council, the Doctoral School Council, and the University Department Councils, divided – in these last two votes – among the various degree programmes to which they belong. They also voted for the Board of Directors of Adisu – the regional agency for the right to university education – and for the University Sports Committee for the 2026/2028 biennium.

At the Academic Senate, where four seats were available (three for student representatives and one for doctoral candidates), AUP obtained 3,142 list votes, Udu 643, and Azione universitaria 202. There were fifty-seven blank ballots. The elected representatives are Debora Cornacchia, Sofia Troisio, and Francesco Pio D’Ercole, known as Kekko, all from AUP. The doctoral candidate seat was assigned to Stefano Di Leo, from the Sidri list, who has already served as a representative on the Polytechnic’s Board of Directors. The Academic Senate is one of the university’s two central bodies, together with the Board of Directors, and performs planning, coordination, and liaison functions between teaching and research structures. The Board of Directors, by contrast, defines the strategic direction, financial and staffing planning, approves the budget, and oversees the financial sustainability of all Polytechnic activities. The two seats on the Board of Directors go to Davide Scarabaggio and Jacopo Mattia Suma, both from AUP. At the list level, the vote ended with 3,123 votes for AUP, 581 for Udu, and 220 for Azione universitaria.

In the Board of Directors of ADiSU, meanwhile, Alberto Aronne Morgese was elected for the Bari office and Antonio Granieri for the Taranto office. Both were AUP candidates, and the list obtained a total of 2,884 votes in Bari (556 UDU and 184 AU) and 96 in Taranto, where the numbers are smaller. UDU, the only competing list in this vote, obtained 36. In the Board of the School of Doctoral Studies, the only list in the race, Sidri, obtained 111 votes, electing Marina Cosmo and Antonio Mastropasqua, while in the University Sports Committee the two available seats were won by Giuseppe Palermo and Marika Russo, both from AUP, which totaled 2,891 list votes. Udu obtained 511 votes and Azione universitaria 212.

AUP also obtained the majority of seats in the CDS - Student Council, the body that represents the student community and has advisory and proposal functions for the governance of the university in the fields of teaching and the right to education. Similarly to the departments, students voted divided among the various degree programmes to which they belong. For the Student Council, 31 seats were available for students and 4 for doctoral candidates: 28 of the 31 go to AUP and 3 to La Volpe, which prevailed in the Architecture and Design degree programmes, both the three-year and the master's degree. The 4 doctoral candidate seats go instead to Sidri, again the only list in the field. In a later phase, the CdS itself will elect its president from among its members. The outgoing president is Davide Cuccovillo, from AUP. In the Department Councils, on the other hand, of the 75 available seats, 60 were assigned to AUP, 10 to La Volpe, 4 to Udu and 1 to Azione universitaria. All elected representatives will take office on 1 October next.

The article Student elections at Poliba: AUP wins again this time comes from Poliba Chronicle.