A guest on 4 in the evening hosted by Paolo Del Debbio, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had the opportunity to claim Italy’s excellent results in the economic field, the nation’s renewed consideration in international forums, and the excellent work done in the fight against illegal immigration and the deception of legal immigration by mafias. And also to remove a few stones from his shoe, responding in tone to the polemics of a left wing that is forced to invent fake news in order to criticise the government and belittle its achievements.
The success of Melonomics
In fact, we were used to Italy being constantly at the bottom of the European rankings in terms of growth, production, and employment. “This is no longer the situation today,” began the premier: Italy, in these months of the Meloni government, has managed to overturn the classic discouraging forecasts. Now our nation is ‘growing, according to European Commission estimates, more than the Eurozone’, is doing better than France and Germany, has ‘the lowest unemployment rate since 2008 and the highest number of employed people since Garibaldi unified Italy’. And again, open-ended contracts are growing, precariousness is falling, record female employment and excellent exports: Italy is the fourth nation in the world for exports. This has never happened before.
It is the data that disprove the left’s bad narratives: ‘The numbers,’ Meloni explained, ‘say that things are better than when the left was in government and,’ she added, ‘I am frankly sorry that a left-wingparty that has claimed throughout its history to be close to the workers is now unable to rejoice at the fact that workers’ wages are rising thanks to our initiatives on the wedge,’ or at the fact that working mothers are being helped by the various family and birth bonuses, or at the fact that job insecurity has fallen. The credit for all this, for the premier, is ‘of the companies, the production system, the workers, their determination, their sacrifices, their creativity’. In this context, ‘the government is trying to help them by restoring authority and credibility to Italy in the world, by restoring stability to this nation‘. Fundamental, therefore, is the help for businesses and workers with the cut in the wedge and the reform of the Irpef, ‘matters on which,’ the premier assured, ‘even in this budget law we will put our resources.
The answer to hoaxes
Giorgia Meloni had the opportunity to respond to another unfounded controversy raised by the left, that of differentiated autonomy. A reform introduced into the Constitution by the left 23 years ago, but without making it enforceable: the Meloni government has simply regulated the principle of differentiated autonomy, so as to ensure precisely that ‘an inequality, a difference, a gap between some regions and others’ is not created. A guarantee of this are the LEP, which the left, 23 years ago, did not think of including: therefore, autonomy does not divide Italy but reunites it, ‘precisely because not having identified those minimum levels of services that should have been equal for all, has created the disparity that we see today’. In short, autonomy, according to the prime minister, ‘is not a clash between North and South, it is a clash between capable and irresponsible ruling classes‘, being a mechanism that rewards virtuous regions but guarantees essential services to less capable councils.
The leader of Fratelli d’Italia has guaranteed that she has ‘no intention of abolishing it’, but rather of defending it, having increased it over the last three years and fighting against the EU’s infringement procedure that would like to extend the subsidy to immigrants as well, thus making it unsustainable for the Italian coffers.
Security Priority
‘We have done a very long job‘ on immigration, says Meloni to Paolo Del Debbio. There has been a drop in landings and it is evident: -65% on 2023, -30% on 2022. Data that, says the premier, also convince Europe, which has followed the new approach devised by the Italian government. “When we arrived,” the Prime Minister explained, “we were only talking about how to redistribute illegal immigrants. Now we only talk about how to try to stop the landings at European borders‘. The work of the executive also extended to the speculations made by the mafias on the legal entries and on the Fluxes Decree, recalling the exposé made by the premier in person to the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office: ‘My thesis,’ Meloni said, ‘is that organised crime has introduced itself into this legislation to do its dirty deeds by using a migration channel to favour illegal immigration. ‘I am surprised,’ she added, ‘ that no one realised this before us.
Among this year’s priorities, Giorgia Meloni certainly included security, recalling the sad story of Sharon Verzeni, brutally murdered by Moussa Sangare, a second-generation immigrant. On the fact, the prime minister said she was ‘shocked‘, especially by the fact that we are talking about ‘a young Italian citizen, who on paper lacks nothing, who stabs a girl for no reason’. ‘I am afraid,’ she explained, ‘that we must be even more frightened about this,’ because here the problem goes beyond the possible measures that a government can take. ‘We are not understanding ,‘ he said, ‘ what is happening to the younger generations, the impact of certain new technologies, the impact of the Internet, the impact of Covid‘. A topic, therefore, that ‘really deserves a debate a little deeper than the debates that,’ he concluded, ‘we are used to having with Italian politics’.
