Speeches

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I voted in favour of this resolution, but I cannot help but point out those national practices which effectively nullify the effectiveness of cohesion policies at territorial level. Why has Germany narrowed the gap between East and West? Why has cohesion policy worked in other EU countries, while southern Italy is increasingly moving away from European standards? And then I will never tire of repeating that, if on the one hand, European funds are allocated to the most difficult territories, on the other hand, Italian governments have always taken away ordinary resources, nullifying any cohesion policy. First, the government will halve your staff. the regions and municipalities are therefore unable to absorb European funds; At that point the government says that you are incapable and implements the replacement power with the side projects, which transform the resources destined for the South into resources spread throughout the national territory. We say that we must restore the criterion of additionality of European resources and introduce a territorial constraint that must be enforced directly by the European Commission, because Italian governments can no longer be trusted.

(IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, speaking of the 'risk' of military attacks on humanitarian aid after the events have already happened, speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of this House. I want to remind you that the Treaty on European Union, the Charter of the United Nations, the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris require us to preserve peace, to prevent conflicts and to refrain from the threat and use, even indirect, of force. Yet our heads of state and government went to shake Netanyahu's hand promptly while committing war crimes and now they do not distance themselves from Israel even in the face of the shame of starving and thirsty civilians. But we have President von der Leyen standing for re-election by promoting rearmament; We have Macron saying that we must send our military to war. But it will not be Macron's children or von der Leyen's children who go to war, it will be as usual the children of the poor who will have to die. So I really hope that in the next European elections the poor, who are so many thanks to these people, can really send Macron, von der Leyen and all these war-friendly people home forever.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I voted against this resolution. The accession of Ukraine to the European Union clearly demonstrates the level of madness and the level of collective hallucination that the Commission executive von der Leyen has reached. Opening the doors of the European Union to a country at war is a real declaration of war against Russia, without any constitutional mandate, in full violation of the Treaty on European Union and in full violation of international law. A country where the rule of law does not exist, social rights are not guaranteed, civil rights, human rights, freedom of thought are not guaranteed; Freedom of expression is not guaranteed. A country led by a President who even allows himself to draw up a proscription list in Italy, with the names of those who according to Zelens'kyj would be supporters of Putin, so much so as to demand from the head of the Italian government that they be silenced. This is scandalous! A Member State of the European Union put under the feet of Zelens'kyj and nobody says anything! We are about to bring the monster into the house, into the European Union, and no one is saying anything here.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I voted against yet another resolution to send weapons and for firm support for Ukraine. We have already supported Ukraine with €91 billion and, despite this, the Ukrainian army is clearly defeated: Let's take note of that. The weakest populations in the European Union paid for this economic effort. It was the poor who paid for the despicable choices of von der Leyen and the European governments, to make an absurd war that we Westerners wanted and provoked. I want to remember that already a week after the beginning of the hostilities, Russia and Ukraine had found a diplomatic agreement, which the United States and the United Kingdom promptly boycotted, sacrificing the Ukrainian population, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of boys at the front on one side and on the other. And they also sacrificed the European economy that is now on its knees in the name of a lousy subjection to the United States and NATO. Perhaps it is not clear to everyone that until now the United States has been ready to fight to the last Ukrainian but now it is ready to fight to the last European.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I voted against this resolution. I state that the death in prison of any political opponent or dissident must be condemned. But the real problem is that in the face of civil rights violations, human rights violations by the Russians, we are all scandalized. But let us quietly close our eyes to the torture of Guantanamo prisoners and quietly close our mouths to the unacceptable detention of Julian Assange. By now everyone has understood that this is yet another opportunity to feed the communist bogeyman: But given Navalny's xenophobic and racist past, given the neo-Nazi-inspired groups in support of Zelensky, given the shameful applause offered to a Nazi war criminal in the Canadian parliament, and given the outrageous support the West has for Netanyahu's criminal actions, my fear is that to fight Communists at all costs, we are becoming increasingly Nazi-like.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, today's vote has put a definitive seal on the futility of this Parliament and this House. Not even in front of the tens of thousands of children massacred in Gaza have we been able to make a useful decision. Clearly, on the subject of war, the right is already the majority in this Parliament. I was present at the debate and everyone was always repeating the same sentence: Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel is already defending itself! It is doing so before an International Court of Justice; It is defending itself against the accusation of genocide made by South Africa, which is the only country that has had the courage to do what we European citizens should have done. And I want to remind everyone that Israel defended itself using the very words of Ursula von der Leyen, who with those words legitimized Israel's disproportionate defense, a defense that to date has caused more than 24,000 innocent victims. So we must not say what Israel must do, we must say what the European Union must stop doing: We must stop supporting these war criminals.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I voted in favour of this resolution because it calls for respect for the rule of law, freedom of expression, equal economic treatment, the rights of disabled people, children and women, and economic, social and environmental rights. How can we not vote for it? The point is that in the same plenary session we also approved a stability pact that further strengthens the external constraint and austerity policy; a constraint that eliminates investment spending with the aim of increasingly reducing the role of states. This means preventing the redistribution of wealth and, therefore, increasing gender, generational and territorial inequalities, which are the basic elements of cohesion policy. So when you're in here claiming the rights that we all agree on, you're resorting to a simple resolution, but when those rights are taken away or eliminated, then you're using legislative packages that are binding and enforceable. It is precisely this hypocrisy that makes the European Union hateful in the eyes of its citizens.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, if you are a young girl from Southern Italy, perhaps from the inner areas that have the highest rate of depopulation, you are the most unfortunate person in Europe; you are the one who has the least chance of being included in the world of work than any other region of our continent. I'm not talking about the difference in pay between men and women: In the South, this problem does not even arise because women do not have a job at all. This resolution rightly emphasises the new causes of these gender inequalities several times and mentions the war in Ukraine, the resulting energy crisis, the resulting inflation crisis and calls on President von der Leyen to uphold her commitment to promoting gender equality in all her policies. But let's not say that von der Leyen, between the sending of arms and direct funding, has allocated as much as 91 billion euros for support to Ukraine, which should have helped to improve the condition of women. Here, this is the double standard that people can't understand and don't understand because it really is incomprehensible.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Union aims to reduce the gap between the levels of development of the various regions and the backwardness of the least favoured regions. This is what is written, in black and white, in Article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Yet in Italy exactly the opposite is happening, Mr President. With the definancing of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan precisely for the interventions that concerned the South; the depletion of the Development and Cohesion Fund, which should have supported territorial inequality; with the illegal blocking of the European Structural Funds, which are intended specifically for the regions of the Mezzogiorno; and with the subtraction of ordinary spending to the detriment of the territories of the South to once again benefit the rich ones of the North. Now the Italian government is about to approve a reform that wants to grant differentiated autonomy to the richest regions to definitively freeze this inequality, breaking up a Member State and nullifying thirty years of European cohesion policy. I say that if the European Commission does not intervene to stop this shameful reform, it will mean that it will be complicit with the Italian government, which is a blatantly and deeply racist government.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this morning President von der Leyen explained to us that it was right to send weapons because the Ukrainians fought for us, defended our democracy and saved our freedom. After more than 200 000 deaths and a defeat at the gates, they still come to explain to us that it was right. They are now telling us that Ukraine meets the Copenhagen criteria and that we can move on to the negotiating stages for membership of the European Union. According to von der Leyen, in Zelensky's Ukraine, with ministers from Svoboda, Pravyj Sektor and UNA-UNSO, i.e. paramilitary organizations inspired by Nazism, the rule of law, social rights, civil rights, human rights, freedom of thought and freedom of expression would be guaranteed. The resolution also says that enlargement is one of the most effective policy tools for investing in peace, security, stability and prosperity on our continent: It is therefore clear that this executive has lost all possible contact with reality and therefore I voted against this delusional resolution.

Mr President, what international relationships can we have with the United States of America? We are fully manipulated by the United States of America, so what kind of relationship are we talking about, exactly? I remember the words of Victoria Nuland, who said, ‘Fuck the EU’. And in fact, we are fucking ourselves. We are fucking our economy because of the war in Ukraine. We are fucking our humanity because of the war in Israel. So what kind of relationship is it if they put the veto on the ceasefire at the United Nations Security Council? I ask how many children still have to die for United the States of America before we call for a ceasefire? And how many innocent civilians still have to die before we put Netanyahu in front of an international court of justice?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is right to pool health data in order to strengthen the statistics of medical assessments and to improve the integrated approach of medical research on a continental scale. I have proposed several times, also in this House, a public and European pharmaceutical company that could counter the dominance and speculative blackmail of private pharmaceutical companies. Essential levels of European assistance would also be needed to ensure that scientific and technological innovations are made available to all European citizens regardless of background or background. In this regard, I would point out that my country, Italy, is launching a reform on differentiated autonomy that will also have the effect of differentiating the law on a territorial basis: a high level of health for the citizens of the Centre and the North and a low level of health for the citizens of the South. This conflicts with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union citizen and I therefore urge the Commission to take action to prevent this profound, yet another injustice.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, how do you create jobs? First of all, we should avoid taking away his work. We have a unique opportunity to reform those mechanisms that strangle the economies of some Member States, but we have not been able to do anything at all. Italy has a public debt of €2.8 trillion, but until now it has already paid €3 trillion in interest payments into bankers' pockets. Is this normal? Yet, every year Italians record a primary surplus that is totally absorbed by interest expenditure. And then Italy found the solution: to charge the expenditure only on a part of its territory. In Italy, the South is sacrificed to maintain competitiveness only in the Centre and the North. And European funds are a ridiculous share of what is taken from the South every year. So work is created in one part of the country, but it is destroyed in the other. I say that the European Commission must explain why it does nothing to prevent these injustices.

I voted against the resolution because the very important phrase 'cease fire' as proposed by the GUE has not been included. And yet I believe that this resolution has had the merit of exposing the gigantic hypocrisies of this House. We have heard colleagues call "free world" what for others is a prison. We heard it repeated that there was an invader and an invader and then promptly sided with the new invader. We have heard that the invasion is the right to defence, and then to grant this right to the invader, and we have heard Russia invoke international law to close its eyes to Israel, which has been trampling on it for fifty years. We have seen colleagues rightly condemn the terrorist acts of Hamas, without, however, saying a word about those committed by Netanyahu. And for these reasons and for this hypocrisy that the world is hating us, because in here we are indignant in alternating phases with an ease that is frightening. I say that in order to really find a non-hypocritical solution, both Hamas and Netanyahu must be removed from the equation.

(IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am addressing the Commission, which has mentioned the national recovery and resilience plans of several countries, but has not also mentioned Italy on the list, of which I will speak. The national plans were designed on the legal basis of social cohesion. The horizontal priorities were gender inequality, generational inequality and especially territorial inequality. Yet, Italy has shifted - I inform you - 70% of the resources that had accrued for the socio-economic condition in which the South flows to the rich part of the country, to the North, leaving only 10% to the South. This has done nothing but widen social tensions, widen the gap, increase unemployment in the South, gender and generational, making it impossible to maintain disability facilities. All this effect was due to the gap that already existed. The point is that we can fill our mouths with fine words about the social economy but, if we do not intervene on this, things will not change, and therefore it is good that the Commission knows this.

Just for a clarification. I have a specific reference to arms trafficking. Let me give you an example to make it clearer: When al-Qaeda was born, at the time of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, the mafia supplied it with weapons. The same has happened with ISIS and the same is happening now in Ukraine. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'd like an answer to.

We certainly need a European response to organised crime, because it is a crime that goes beyond national borders. I come from a territory in which the mafia, the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta, the Holy United Crown have organized themselves and I can therefore say with certainty that the mafias feed on two ingredients that, however, do not all appear in those listed in the EMPACT programme. The first is the poverty of the territories of origin and therefore the accomplices of the mafias are responsible for that poverty. All those governments that take away human and economic resources, that cut education, that cut health, that cut work are responsible. The second ingredient is all those governments that use organized crime to do the dirty work. I am talking about arms trafficking with the aim of destabilizing governments around the world. If the European Union really wants to fight the mafias, it must be ready to denounce those friendly governments that are behind wars, that arm wars, that finance wars and that provoke wars because they do so with the instrument of organized crime. I wonder if the Commission is aware of all this.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in these conclusions the Council reiterates its firm condemnation of the Russian aggression in Ukraine, because it rightly calls it a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. The same charter that NATO violated in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Libya, Serbia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq. Then we must ask ourselves whether it really makes sense to demand that others respect international law when we are the first to violate it; We must ask ourselves whether we can appeal for respect for international bodies after we have emptied them of all possible content. So today, if we really want to stop this war, we must take steps in the direction of peace. We must have the courage to say that Ukraine will never be part of NATO. We Westerners put this on the peace table. You, Russia, what are you willing to do? This is the only way to save many lives, both Ukrainian and Russian.

(IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a key instrument for addressing global social and environmental challenges, but there are important data gaps for the regional monitoring of the Union's south. Then I am obliged to report the real reasons why Italy, the country from which I come, shows the worst results in terms of poverty, unemployment, inequality, food price crisis, environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. All this happens because Italy is a country that does the interests of only a part of its territory. In Italy it is normal for public expenditure in the Centre-North to be EUR 17 000, while in the South EUR 13 000. It is normal for a child in the North to be able to spend EUR 3 500 on education, but in the South EUR 19. In Italy it is normal for high-speed rail to be 84 % in the North and only 16 % in the South. So, Mr President, the European Union must intervene to prevent Italian governments from using part of the country as a colony and to ensure equal social and civil rights for all its citizens.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Western democratic systems are in crisis, because it is now clear to everyone that politics does not represent the will of ordinary citizens. Politics increasingly represents the interests of financial powers, Freemasons, international funds, the oil industry, the drugs and pesticides industry, and the arms industry. Therefore, in order to restore citizens' trust in our democratic system, the role of investigative journalism must be protected in the face of complaints about tax avoidance, tax evasion, corruption, organised crime and money laundering, but above all those investigative journalists who report war crimes must be protected. And the European Union should not regard Julian Assange's persecution as bearable because he has revealed the dirty secrets of wars and the systemic failure of our democratic institutions in accordance with the principles of the rule of law.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this important resolution was voted on today, but paradoxically, and also ironically, at the end of this vote, all the Members of Parliament went quietly to eat. That is why I want to read some of the sentences in this resolution so that the citizens are aware of what has been decided in this House. The ultimate goal of the international community should be the military collapse of Russian forces, the full restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, the need for further intensification of financial and military assistance, an immediate deployment of additional modern equipment, including Western fighter jets, missiles and helicopters, the demand for an accelerated action plan for Ukraine's NATO membership. In short, this resolution seems to be written by fools. Does anyone who writes this resolution really think that Russia will eventually accept military collapse without resorting to nuclear power? Are we making Ukrainians believe that it is really possible to restore its territorial integrity without bringing the world into a nuclear conflict? Do you really think it's a good idea for Ukraine to be integrated into NATO? We are on our way to World War III.

Madam President, international law says that the Russian invasion is as illegal as the NATO wars in Iraq, Serbia, Libya and Syria. These are all illegal wars waged by the rich, fought by the poor and paid for by even poorer citizens. So this war is actually the usual war on the poor. There is no money, but Europe saved the banks in banking crises. There is no money, but member states immediately responded to NATO's call for a war effort of up to 2 percent of GDP. And if you find the money for Covid, the heavy bureaucracy prevents you from absorbing those resources in the poorest areas of our continent. Right now there are millions of European citizens who do not have the opportunity to put food at the table. But this European Union has the money for the banks, it has the money for war, but it does not have the money for its poor citizens. That is why I voted 'no' to the Asap resolution. We in Ukraine must not send ammunition, we must send solutions. We must not export democracy, we must export diplomacy.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that we must take note of the fact that in the European Union social and civil rights are not safeguarded in the event of conflict with economic freedoms. Right now, in Italy, there are young people protesting in Milan, in Turin, in Rome, in Cagliari, in Florence, in Pavia. Often they are young people from the south, the poor part of the country, who live off-site and who protest against the expensive rents and against the geographical discrimination of transport, factors that also deprive them of the right to study. Rents are inaccessible and the cost of flights back home has more than doubled. airlines have distorted competition and the price of a ticket from Rome to Palermo can reach a thousand euros, but no one is doing anything at all. The European Union, for its part, urgently needs to be more social and to take action, so the Porto Forum must really be the place to ban unpaid traineeships, to ensure access to housing, to combat geographical discrimination in transport and to really guarantee all our children the right to study.

Mr President, I had written something else, but then I got caught up in the words of the right. Illegality. Irregularities. Those who deserve it. Violation of international law. But, I say, do you really believe that a mother who boards a boat with her child to cross the Mediterranean wonders if what she is doing is illegal or if she is somehow violating international law? Is this the analysis of the right? I believe that this shows, now more than ever, that a European responsibility is needed for new rules on migrants and on asylum policies, since without rules this right can appoint commissioners with special powers over migrants, it can restrict the meshes of reception, it can de facto limit the action of the coast guard, putting human lives at risk. In short, as usual, a right that is strong with the weak and weak with the strong.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, in times of war and economic crisis, unfortunately, it is always culture that pays first, and therefore maximum solidarity with the artists who are victims of war. I come from a territory, the South of Italy, rich in art and culture, so there are endless possibilities for economic recovery linked to the artistic, historical and monumental heritage. The objective would also meet the priority of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, which aims to reduce the territorial divide. We must therefore look at the cut of the East-West route due to the war, as a need to strengthen and strengthen instead the route that goes from North to South and looks to Africa, but definitively abandoning the idea of a colonial model. The South of Italy, thanks to its centrality between Europe, Africa and the Middle East, can offer the role of cultural and commercial hub for the entire European Union. That is why, Commissioner Dalli, I hope that this great opportunity for the European Union will not be missed once again.