Procaccini: “We need a more realistic and pragmatic Europe.” “Draghi? Premature to talk about it, but better suited to the EU Council”

Rome – “I feel this will be the most participated European election ever.” Nicola Procaccini, president of the European Conservatives and Reformists and head of the Environment and Energy department of Fratelli d’Italia, justifies his conviction with a reason of “domestic politics because it is a sort of test for the government” and one of a “content-based nature because there is a growing awareness of how much Brussels decisions can count on our lives.” Having made this premise, Procaccini, host of GeaTalk, the video format of GEA, the news agency of the Withub group,  dismantles, as an MEP, what has been done in the last five years while acknowledging the tremendous impact of the pandemic and two wars: “Certainly there is no lack of justifications, but the judgment remains critical precisely for the management of these wars and for the Green Deal, conditioned by an ideological fury that has proved harmful.” The example is that of raw materials for the energy transition, but also the management of migrants: “If there had been a little more realism, a little more pragmatism in the work of the European Commission in these five years, several problems we face today would be less fearful and less serious than they are.”

Thus, Ursula von der Leyen is rejected, although she is in tune with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; the future could be Mario Draghi. The name is very much in vogue in these weeks even if it doesn’t seem to gather unanimous support in Italy: “We have not said that we are against him; we said that, at the moment, it is premature to talk about it and that, net of Draghi’s authoritativeness, we need to see what the role will be. Because there are more or less political roles,” is Procaccini’s distinction. Which takes the form of a different chair than the one imagined as von der Leyen’s successor: “My feeling is that his figure is more placeable in the European Council than in the European Commission; frankly, I cannot think of him in that role.”

On June 10, Europe could have profoundly different connotations from today. “My wishful thinking is clearly that we shift the balance point a bit more to the right, that we can return to the confederal Europe that was envisioned when the European Union was born,” the FdI exponent confesses. So, it is the opposite of the federalist superstate that others legitimately support instead. We do not share this idea, and so we hope that a political position can emerge that returns to being that of an alliance of nations that do few things together but serious and important.” The tow is that of the prime minister: “Giorgia Meloni is probably the only one who is able to speak with everyone at the European Council because she does not have a snotty nose like others, she does not give licences to democratically elected governments, she reasons with everyone in a serene, open, and equal way and this certainly allows her to have an influence certified even today by Time, which calls her one of the most influential people on the planet.”

On the “green” issue and the economic management of this now inescapable transition, Procaccini uses a somewhat heavier hand: for the future, we need “the opposite of what has been done” and stresses that “if the ecological transition is done only by us and we are not able to condition others, we risk having unrealistic results in terms of environmental protection and at the same time we risk heavily conditioning not only economic production but also the social fallout and the fallout on the environment itself.” For green homes, the MEP from Fratelli d’Italia calls for “common sense” and gives reasons for it: “These are such utopian goals that they don’t make much of a change. We carry—and who knows for how many years we will carry—on our skin the marks of the 110% Superbonus that allowed us to renovate and thus make more energy-efficient less than ten per cent of the homes that would have to comply with the Green Homes Directive.
We achieved this at a cost our children and their children will bear.” This is more or less the same discomfort created by the new CAP, which provoked the tractor protests and put Brussels to the sword: “From this ideological radicalism of which Timmermans was perhaps the highest representative came regulations and directives that more or less every three, four months were aimed at hitting nature’s workers, so farmers, ranchers, fishermen. It is an atrocious paradox,” Procaccini denounces.

Paradoxical, he says, is also what happened to the National Conservative Conference, which was stopped in Brussels by police intervention. “It was a surreal scene,” Procaccini confesses. “The police came and tried to clear a room where there were, by the way, cardinals, intellectuals. This tells of an ugly climate that I hope does not degenerate further because even in Italy, there is more or less that same feeling. I am referring to the clashes at the university, an extremism on the left that is increasingly mounting and, in my opinion, should worry us.”