“We will put the veto on any attempt to limit the presence of government bonds in banks“. Matteo Renzi is a resolute one who, on his return from his visit to Argentina (where an Italian prime minister has not been there since 1998) presented himself to the Senate to report on the matter to the European Council scheduled for Thursday. “We will be without yielding to exemplary coherence and strength”, added the premier, who recalled with a veil of controversy that “the real question of banks in Europe is the enormous question that concerns the first and second German banks. I'm 'rooting' for them, but the fact is that instead of dealing with Italian government bonds, we need to have the strength to say that in the belly of many European banks there is an excess of derivatives and toxic securities”. The premier refers above all to the case that hit Deutsche Bank, which had lost 40% on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange year-to-date as of last week as derivatives premiums soared to exorbitant levels. After the collapse, to reassure the markets, the German institute announced that it will repurchase part of its senior debt for a value of just under 5 billion euros, out of a total of 50 billion outstanding.
Renzi then spoke of the future of Europe: "To say that a policy solely focused on theausterity and which deals in a questionable way with banks and not with social issues means being consistent with the history of Italy and also telling a bit of the truth. At the Council we will talk about many things but the common thread is one: understanding whether in the next few years Europe will go back to being a community or whether it will be just a contract”. On the table of the Council tomorrow, Thursday 18 February, there are various dossiers, first of all Brexit and migrants. “All necessary efforts must be made – said the Prime Minister speaking in the Senate – for keep the UK in the EU: we say this in the interest of the British because first of all a possible exit would be a dramatic loss for them. But it is also in the interests of all Europeans, because if one of the large G7 countries decides to do without the EU, the message goes beyond the reduction from 28 to 27, which would be an unprecedentedly serious event: it would be a sign of a countertrend historical significance". However, Renzi added: “We must not slavishly accept London's requests. We are for a compromise and Tusk's letter goes in this direction. There is something to be done and to be discussed and we will do it tomorrow, certainly the stakes that Italy must adhere to are, in my opinion, the centrality of the euro, Europe's leadership must be strongly strengthened”.
On the issue of refugees, Renzi has already shown that he has clear ideas: “The EU was born when the walls were torn down and if a generation of zigzagging leaders who are more concerned with consensus than with the historical moment does not say this, it will be up to us Italians to say that Europe was born not to stem the world outside, but as an exciting place to attract best part of the world and if this does not happen there is a problem in Europe and we as Italians have the duty and right to point it out". Going into the merits of the matter, the premier recalled in the Senate Hall that Italy cannot do the repatriations alone, but Europe must take care of it. “There is a principle of respect for the rules: those who do not have the right to reception must be sent home, we say it from day one. But if the EU does the repatriations, it's a film, if the individual states do it, another film”. Among the European countries, Italy appears to be the one that has made the most repatriations, yet "it is a shared opinion that they are not enough". Renzi concluded his speech by illustrating the proposal that will be brought to the European Council: “There must be a single right to asylum, it is not possible to have separate rules. The times in which we were saying about immigration seem very distant, but it was less than a year ago, that it was a European issue: very few had joined the Italian cry of pain. The times when the governments at the table hid themselves behind the short-sighted and asphyxiated rules of the Dublin Treaty are long gone: today there is no one who does not see that the issue is European”.
