Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-10-Speech-3-079"
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"en.20071010.17.3-079"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the Lamassoure-Severin report should be scornfully rejected because of its ideological anti-Italian subtext and the superficial nature of the technical arguments versus the political arguments on which it rests. I will not enter into a discussion of the merits of how much the
weighs with me as compared with the Jacobinism of the
as this is clearly absent from the thinking of the rapporteurs and those who commissioned the initiative.
I am not a legal expert, nor do I have a major reputation like Professor Manzella, chairman of the Italian Senate’s Committee on European Affairs, nor like other fellow Members, who can challenge with equal precision the legal inconsistency of the assertions made in the report. I believe, however, that it is worth stressing that for the rapporteurs incontestable facts do not count: in politics it is the assessment and the role that Italy has had in the past and still has today in the institution of Europe.
The very poorly Italianised principle of degressive proportionality, redefining the allocation of seats established in the Constitutional Treaty that has been put on hold, has been applied with clear discrimination against Italy. For some countries brackets have been left in the system, and there are some glaring instances of distortion of the facts, such as the allocation to Estonia of the same number of seats as Malta, although it has three times the population.
We can accept that in the United Kingdom people with the right to vote include residents who are not European citizens, and on this basis the rapporteurs allocate the UK one more seat than Italy, even though of those with the right to vote only a little more than one third voted in the 2004 election. We can accept that France, which compiles its electorate and fills up its demographic profile with the same variety of birthplaces that can be seen in its national football team, is allocated two more seats than Italy. We can accept the sloth of the Italian Government and we saw the flight at the time of the preliminaries to the debate in the Council.
There is something, however, that cannot be accepted. The rapporteurs cling to their debatable sense of citizenship. They claim that anyone living in Europe, even if they hold passports and citizenships from outside Europe, is a voter. They exclude from the calculation, however, citizens living outside Europe. This gives an idea of the gross, manipulative and unacceptable anti-Italian discrimination that we most strongly reject!"@en1
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