Rome – Some controversy over the method chosen by fellow Prime Ministers representing the parties of the emerging majority in Parliament for appointments to be proposed to the European Council, claiming for Italy a weighty role in the next EU executive, reiterating criticism of a European Union that she sees as distant from citizens and too bureaucratic, but, in essence, Giorgia Meloni does not seem to want to get in the way of the European “top jobs” and instead promises battle over the policies that the Union will have to design, at the governmental and parliamentary level.
Reshaping the Green Deal to “protect nature with humans in it,” the Green Homes Directive still has “targets that are too close-up and onerous.” Protect farmers “affected by furiously ideological measures;” defend businesses from unfair competition. More importantly, simplify. To the point of proposing a Commissioner of Unbureaucratization “to show a change of pace.” These are the Meloni government’s priorities in Europe.
They will emerge in the first Council of the new EU parliamentary legislature (June 27-28), which officially kicks off on July 16. The definition of the top posts is getting closer, and Rome, excluded for now from the negotiations, does not intend to remain on the sidelines because citizens “have spoken,” the premier recalls in the briefing to the House. The goal is to work for a heavyweight Commissioner “that we are entitled to,” she said.
It is a clear warning: “fireplace logics” in which “some claim to decide for all” will not be accepted, overriding the consensus. No to any “meeting by invitation in European sauce,” the Conservative leader warns.
Meloni highlights the abstentionism figure, which plastically represents a growing disaffection. For the first time, participation in Italy slipped below 50 percent to 48.3 percent of eligible voters. A sign, she says, that citizens perceive Brussels as “too invasive,” as a Union that “claims to impose what to eat, what car to drive, how to renovate one’s home, how much land to cultivate, what technology to develop,” the premier notes.
So, citizens “have made it clear which model they prefer between the one carried so far and the one we are proposing,”she claims.
One fact that has emerged from this round of voting that Meloni considers “unquestionable”: “The rejection of the policies pursued by the governing forces in many of the large European nations that are also often the forces that have imprinted the policies of the Union in recent years.”
The answer to “decline” for the Prime Minister lies in the need to “privilege the bureaucratic giant with a political giant,” Meloni reiterates. She talks about increasing strategic autonomy, building secure and reliable supply chains, and decreasing strategic dependencies, making Europe a place “where it pays to invest,” but at the same time protecting it from unfair competition from non-EU countries because “the market is free if it is fair.” And again: build new partnerships with Africa, following the model of the Mattei Plan, with which “Italy has set the standard,” and enhance the geographical position of our country, a natural platform in the Mediterranean, to make it a “supply hub” and a “bridge between the eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and Europe.”
English version by the Translation Service of Withub