When voters speak, you need to know how to listen to them. The center-right has always had deep respect for it both when it was rewarded with the victory of all the elections in these three years and today when we lost them in a very clear and very clear way. I'm from Milan and I was very struck by the fact that Pisapia got votes from social classes that traditionally voted for the centre-right, such as people with VAT numbers, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
Today the challenge before us is one of renewal, of relaunching the economy, of fighting tax evasion without harassing small and medium-sized enterprises. We must carry out the tax reform that everyone has been asking for for years and we must carry out a reform that puts the person and the family at the centre. We are all responsible for this electoral result, it is a strong signal but I would be very careful before ringing the death knell, it is certain that when Milan, Naples, Cagliari and Trieste are lost, it is an important signal.
On the one hand, the government must relaunch itself and abandon the image of a quarrelsome politics and unfortunately the PDL has in some cases been damaged by personalism and we lose because we continue to divide ourselves, not because we are unable to present a candidate. Pisapia and De Magistris, to whom I send my best wishes, are now called to a challenge: to translate what they said during the electoral campaign into concrete facts and in collaboration with the institutions.
Today we would be making two big mistakes if we did not clearly understand what the voters asked of us and if we thought about the future and not about the present, thinking about the future in the sense of worrying about Berlusconi's succession and not understanding that we can only build a large centre-right party if today we work with President Berlusconi to relaunch that government action and that party which today in any case represents 30% of Italians. Nobody wants to minimize the defeat but the PDL remains the leading party in Italy. I am concerned that voters are choosing, in two large cities, representatives who do not come from the reformist Democratic Party, but from the extreme left and from a populist culture. We must draw the right considerations from this vote: losing Milan and Naples is not a trivial matter.
But in Naples the Democratic Party has disappeared. There are lights and shadows in the analysis, these elections call for a strong and serious strengthening of government action. We must forcefully govern, translate our values into facts. We have a majority in Parliament and this must be the way out of this situation. However, Berlusconi's leadership is not in question, the government has done very well in these three years; these elections stimulate us to do even more.
