After the whole legal tsunami that recently hit the Abruzzo Region, we are here to try to find out what can be done. Let’s make one thing very, very clear: that which has happened in Abruzzo is no different to what is happening in the healthcare sector in all of the other Regions as well.
There is no such thing as a right wing coalition and a left wing coalition. All there is, is bribery and corruption across the board, a kind of bribery federalism that, since the healthcare federalism began transferring resources from the Government to the Regions, has also begun transferring bribery and corruption from Central Government to Regional Government.
Irrespective of any personal guilt, which is strictly legal in nature, there is also a certain political guilt that is monumental. Here in the Abruzzo Region, from where I am currently talking to you, the judges are discovering some pretty incredible things, far worse than the Milan “Tangentopoli” scandal, involving all of the parties from the centre-right through to the centre-left. While the coalitions in Government may well have changed, the people in charge of the money have always been the same, paying off first one side, then the other.
So what can we do now? We must go ahead and bring in a new generation of people at the top. The Italia dei Valori party has been saying this for some time now. Unless we bring in some new faces, the political situation will not change.
Here in Abruzzo they are asking us whether we will be joining this or that party. We have no interest in joining any of the big-name parties. What does interest us is to stand beside the people, and so we are turning to civil society so that, together, we can build a new political class, one with clean hands, in order to give a Region back its dignity and let it be an example for all of the other Regions, where a variety of scandals have either already exploded, or are about to do so.
That is why I believe that, at this moment in time, the important thing is not to join this or that party, but rather to congregate with good people who decide to go into politics in order to avoid putting the political power back in the hands of the same old people.