For Premier Meloni, at the Chamber for the confidence vote, “there is no more convinced environmentalist than a conservative.” The most significant points of her speech.
"Ecology is the most vivid example of the alliance between those who are here, those who have been here, and those who will come after us"
In an hour and twenty minutes of address, Giorgia Meloni entrusts to a quotation from Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher, the passage devoted to the environment. She then adds that "there is no more convinced environmentalist than a conservative." The President of the Council, who is expected to receive a confidence vote from the Chamber by this evening (and from the Senate tomorrow), touches on a great many points in her programmatic speech, from the economic crisis to the war in Ukraine (reaffirming her majority's Atlanticist position), and calls for a constitutional reform of the Italian system along semi-presidentialist, French-style lines to be completed by the end of the legislature.
The passage on environmental policy comes in the second part. "We know that young people care particularly deeply about defending the natural environment. We will take this on board." However, she adds, "what distinguishes us from a certain ideological environmentalism is that we want to defend nature with humanity at its centre. Combining environmental, economic and social sustainability. Accompanying businesses and citizens towards the green transition without surrendering to new strategic dependencies and respecting the principle of technological neutrality. This will be our approach."
The premier, who sets neither her own goals nor provides precise targets, nonetheless knows that her government — which has already opened the door to nuclear energy experimentation and is in favour of gas and regasification terminals — will face challenges from climate activists, and she admits: "I cannot hide the fact that I will look upon them with sympathy."
On the subject of gas, Meloni clarifies a fundamental point about the path to follow — an energy mix of renewable and non-renewable sources: "Our seas contain gas reserves that we have a duty to exploit to the full," she states. And then: "our nation, and southern Italy in particular, is home to a wealth of renewables, a heritage of green energy too often held back by bureaucracy."
Meloni opens her speech by speaking, not by chance, about democracy, stating that "for me it is a great responsibility to deserve the confidence of Parliament, and equally so for those who must grant or deny it: these are the great principles of democracy to which we must never become inured." She thanks Mario Draghi "who offered every availability for a swift and peaceful handover of power despite the new government being led by the only party that was in opposition. That is how it works in great democracies." She then addresses a much-anticipated topic: her past: "Contrary to what has been instrumentally claimed, I have never felt any sympathy for any totalitarian regime, starting with the fascist one. And I regard the racial laws as the lowest point in our history. The totalitarianisms of the 20th century deserve no justification of any kind and cannot be offset by other horrors or crimes: in the abyss the accounts are never settled — you simply fall."
Yet immediately afterwards she does draw a comparison: "From a very young age I found the scent of freedom, the longing for historical truth and the rejection of any form of abuse or discrimination precisely by being active in the Italian democratic right. A community of men and women who have always operated in the open and as full participants in our republican institutions, even in the darkest years of criminalisation and political violence, when in the name of militant antifascism innocent young people were killed with blows from a monkey wrench. That long season of grief perpetuated the hatred of the civil war and delayed a national reconciliation that the Italian democratic right, more than anyone else, has always sought.
Meloni cites abortion and women's rights and assures: "We will counter every form of racism, antisemitism, political violence and discrimination." She then turns on external interference: "Those who say they want to monitor our country could make better use of their time: in this parliament there are strong and combative political forces capable of making their voices heard — I hope without external interventions. I hope they will agree with me that whoever speaks from outside of wanting to monitor us is offending not me but the entire country."
The final section also gives considerable space to the chapter on immigration. According to Giorgia Meloni, "as in every serious country, entry into Italy is only possible legally through the quota decree system. Too many men, women and children have lost their lives at sea trying to reach Italy. This government wants to pursue the path of stopping illegal departures by finally breaking the human trafficking networks."
Having been criticised during the election campaign for using the concept of a naval blockade, Meloni explains that "if you do not want me to speak of a naval blockade, I will put it this way: the third phase of the European Union's Operation Sophia envisaged precisely the blocking of boats in North Africa: we intend to put this back to Europe, establishing assessment commissions on African soil to evaluate who has the right to be received and who does not. We simply want to prevent people smugglers from deciding who gets to enter Italy."
There is also a proposal — "the most important one" — to "remove the causes that drive migrants to seek a better life in Europe: on 27 October next it will be the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Enrico Mattei, a great Italian who was among the architects of post-war reconstruction, capable of forging mutually beneficial agreements with nations across the world. I believe that Italy should champion a "Mattei plan" for Africa, a virtuous model of collaboration and growth between the European Union and African nations, also to counter the worrying spread of Islamist radicalism, particularly in the sub-Saharan area."
The widespread poverty documented in the recent Caritas report, and the citizens' income scheme, occupy a paragraph of the premier's speech. His Holiness Pope Francis recently reaffirmed an important principle: 'Poverty is not fought with welfare handouts — the door to a person's dignity is work.' This is a profound truth, one that only those who have known poverty at close quarters can fully appreciate. This is the path we intend to take: we want to maintain and, where possible, increase the necessary financial support for those who are genuinely vulnerable and unable to work: I am thinking of pensioners in difficulty, of disabled people whose level of protection must be increased by every means available, and also of those without income who have dependent minor children to care for."
For Premier Meloni, "Italy is not a country for young people. Over time, our society has become increasingly indifferent to their future, even to the widespread phenomenon of young people who exclude themselves from the educational and working system, as well as to the growing emergency of deviant behaviour involving drugs, alcoholism and crime. The pandemic has decidedly worsened this situation, yet the response from certain quarters of politics has been to promise everyone free cannabis. Because it was the easiest answer. But we are not here to do easy things.
Finally, a dedication to Paolo Borsellino and all those who lost their lives in the fight against the Mafia. "Legality will be the North Star of the government's action. I began my political career in the immediate aftermath of the via D'Amelio massacre, driven by the idea that one could not simply stand by and watch: the journey that brings me here today was born from that hero, from Paolo Borsellino. We will face the cancer of the Mafia with our heads held high, as we have been taught by the many heroes who refused to look away and run, even knowing that this would lead them to their deaths: a very long list of men and women whom we will not forget."
