The “Italia dei Valori” Party met yesterday and called together its National Executive in order to state its position regarding the topics and the political agenda currently under discussion. We have already decided as follows.
As regards the Institutional and constitutional Reform Plan, we reiterated our bi-polar identity. In the sense that we must arrive at an electoral law that is either majoritarian or proportional and we ask that it make provision for the naming of the person who will be the Premier designate, which coalitions support him and what his programme will entail, prior to the elections, based on which we will then face the voters.
We are not reiterating our majoritarian aspirations, but we are declaring our willingness to discuss various solutions that may be put forward, as long as these meet two other conditions.
Firstly: that the voting public be given a real opportunity to indicate and identify their preferred candidate, a choice that can be made preferentially either during the primaries or at the time of the elections.
Secondly: that the solution adopted, whether it be proportional or majoritarian, will result in a reduction of the number of parties, because we firmly believe that the current fragmentation does not help in terms of Government action and the clarity of relationships. In particular, we agree that there is a need to rewrite the parliamentary regulations, so that a grouping may only be formed if the prospective members have been confirmed in the elections.
We agreed that further intervention is necessary with regard to those regulations that are not directly linked to the electoral model, but which are currently linked and permit the proliferation of parties, the major one being the Public Financing System because, as long as there is any possibility of accessing financing with as little as 1% of the vote, thereby ensuring the party’s survival, this is more than sufficient temptation to join forces purely to overcome the hurdle and then to separate again immediately thereafter.
We in the “Italia dei Valori” Party are re-establishing our identity, not tied to any particular ideology, put to the politics of action. We do not wish to be labelled and we reject anyone that wishes to classify us as a centralist, right wing or left wing party. We believe that these topics and methods belong to the past and, since the party was born at a post-ideological time, we therefore see ourselves as a party that wishes to reason in terms of values, plans and personal credibility, rather than in terms of ideological membership and, in this sense, we openly declare that absence of any preclusions based on ideology as regards the other parties.
One of our priorities is our political, institutional and planning dialogue with the Democratic Party, with which we have many common views regarding future plans, points which both parties share and which we hope to implement jointly, many of which we have already discussed in the past, and continue to discuss on a daily basis. This notwithstanding, we believe that the Democratic Party must first clarify what its future will hold in terms of collaboration. We therefore maintain that, given the current circumstances, we are not in a position to establish any form of direct collaboration with the extreme leftists, at least not for the next legislature, since their position is based on ideology that is respectable and respected, but nevertheless different from ours. This is because we wish to discuss plans, and sometimes the plans they wish to implement, based on their ideology, do not coincide with ours.

During the next administrative elections, we will be having discussions, municipality-by-municipality, province-by-province and in the place where the Regional elections are to be held, with any political forces that wish to hold discussions with us. We will firstly open our doors to the Democratic Party, however, they will first have to tell us to whom they are allied and for what purposes.
We of the “Italia dei Valori” Party reiterate our faith in the Prodi Government because we believe in its merit by reason of what they have done in the past and that which it was able to achieve. In the space of a year and a half in power, and faced with such a precarious majority, it has been able to achieve far more and in so many different areas than other “bulgarian” majorities have and, as far as I am concerned, most certainly in terms of infrastructure. We have achieved a figure of almost 40% return on our resources and have developed a series of relationships, the main one being that we are the first European country to have received any major European financing for trans-national networks.
We of the “Italia dei Valori” Party, in any event, reiterate our faith in the Prodi Government because of the commitments made to the electorate, whom we approached by saying that this Government, this coalition, this programme is part of “Italia dei Valori”, and that we would not attempt to put a spoke in any wheel, nor would we work at cross purposes in the case of any vote of confidence.
We of the “Italia dei Valori” Party acknowledge that a part of the coalition is wanting a review in January, which we are in favour of, on condition that the matters to be handled fall within the programme agreed to at the time with the electorate, and that we are prepared to identify priorities within the programme, on condition that we are allowed to have our say.
We are prepared to do this so that, after the finalisation of the Budget, the Government can reorganise itself on a functional level, with a complete, 360° organisational restructuring that includes a significant reduction in the Government structure. Should there be any review in this regard, we of the “Italia dei Valori” Party are in favour of any appropriate measures, starting precisely when the decision is made in terms of numbers specified by the law, and we place ourselves at their disposal, as do I personally as regards my ministry.
In conclusion, with reference to the many personalities and new political affiliations on the political horizon, we wish to state that we are prepared to not close our doors to anyone, but rather to dialogue with everyone. We will obviously lay down certain exclusions of an ethical and moral nature, since we cannot be seen to dialogue with criminals convicted by the courts, or with political or pseudo political organisations with neo-nazi or neo-fascist leanings, because we too have certain accepted limits. We are a movement that aligns itself, at the European level, with the Liberal Democrat Grouping of the ELDR, which is represented in the European Parliament where we also have our own representative. On Monday I will be presenting the “Italia dei Valori” party in its new guise to the European Parliamentary group of the ELDR.