After yesterday's three votes, today the Chamber approved the corruption bill with 354 yes, 25 no and 102 abstentions, which is now being examined by the Senate. The green light has arrived, but the unity of the majority is now a thing of the past. The votes that approved the measure are over 100 fewer than the number of deputies supporting the Monti government.
The strongest protest comes from the Pdl, in which there were as many as 38 abstentions (including Renato Brunetta, Guido Crosetto, Alfredo Mantovano, Mario Landolfi, Gaetano Pecorella, Giorgio Stracquadanio, Aldo Brancher). The party leader, Angelino Alfano, was not even present in the Chamber. The secretary of the Democratic Party, Pier Luigi Bersani, was not there either, but he clarified that he was busy with other appointments. Also absent are 11 other deputies from the Democratic Party and 59 from the Pdl. Four absentees from the UDC.
The pidiellini Luca D'Alessandro and Lucio Barani, Santo Versace (Api), two deputies from Popolo e Territorio and two from Nps voted against the IDV bill. Instead, the Northern League and six Radical deputies elected on the Pd lists abstained.
"In the Senate we will uphold the civil liability of the judges and we will give you, Minister, an element of reflection - warns the group leader of the PDL in the Chamber, Fabrizio Cicchitto, addressing the head of Justice, Paola Severino -: do not come and propose amendments with the 'exercise by the government of what happened here, because in this case we will not vote for confidence on this point, because we do not want to be strangled further.
Cicchitto then anticipated the PDL's intention to modify the text during the third reading in the Senate, in particular in the passages relating to the crime of extortion and the new case of "trafficking of influences".
For his part, Severino expresses "great satisfaction with the approval of the law, albeit through a trust that I personally would have avoided, but today's vote demonstrates that it was necessary". The rules on extortion "were not written for anyone, I have not thought of any process. Even 'the important trials' that are written about in the newspapers have a statute of limitations, 2017 and 2019, this must be taken into consideration".
On the ineligibility of the convicts "no names have emerged, I don't know them and I don't want to know them. The government must make its decisions regardless of the names of the people involved". The approval of an agenda which commits the Government to approve "within four months" the regulation of the ineligibility for Parliament for those convicted of serious crimes with a final sentence is a "very important" fact, which will help allay "those fears about the impossibility to proceed within the next elections”.
