Because Meloni’s slap at Conte and Di Maio on the Mes is sacrosanct
How and why Meloni on the ESM criticized Conte and Di Maio. Comment by Giuseppe Liturri
When enough is enough. And it must have seemed too much to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and on Tuesday evening in the Chamber, with a reply on Wednesday morning in the Senate, she decided not to send word to former President Giuseppe Conte, regarding the events that led to the signing of the reform of the ESM Treaty on 27 January 2021. He "sang it to him", even with a certain vehemence.
Meloni reproached Conte, and his Foreign Minister at the time Luigi Di Maio at the hands of the plenipotentiary ambassador to the EU Maurizio Massari, for having signed the text of the reform of the ESM Treaty on 27 January 2021, even though he had resigned from previous day and therefore in office for the "handling of current affairs".
Furthermore, Meloni objected that that signature was in any case placed in the absence of a parliamentary mandate.
Given that that signature only sanctioned the agreement on a shared negotiating text, to be ratified by the respective national parliaments, the only ones entitled to assume binding commitments, Meloni's two findings are linked. Because it is true that the parliamentary debate of 9 December 2020 ended with the approval of a resolution which, among other things, committed the government to " finalising the political agreement reached at the Eurogroup and the agenda of the 'Eurosummit on the reform of the ESM treaty '. And with that mandate Conte went a few days later to the Eurosummit which was decisive for the definition of political will.
But it is also true that that same Parliament had previously approved two resolutions (in June and December 2019, albeit with a change of Government and relative majority in the middle), with which it reiterated the need for the ESM reform to proceed equally step with that of other pillars of the institutional architecture of the EU (Banking Union and Stability Pact). That Parliament had expressed a clear political will to consider the ESM as a piece of an overall plan that had to at least be defined, if not completed, jointly. Otherwise, the government would have lacked a mandate in the negotiations and ratification would never have come. In summary, no package, no ESM reform. And therefore that signature, which sanctioned the end of the negotiations, should never have been signed.
And the resolution of December 2020, albeit with more nuanced terms than that of a year earlier, also reiterated this political will.
When Conte presented his government's resignation to the President of the Republic on 26 January 2021, he remained in office, as always happens, to "handle current affairs". A very flexible concept, interpreted from time to time by the resigning Presidents with a specific directive addressed to their ministers. And that of President Conte had a relatively limited range of action. But regardless of the legitimacy of the actions implemented by that government, after the resignation on the morning of January 26, a gigantic problem of political expediency cannot fail to be evident.
How was it possible for Conte and Di Maio to take on the enormous responsibility of signing a text, when the political majority which, despite a thousand distinctions, had given them the mandate to "finalize the political agreement reached in the Eurogroup" (of 11/30/2020, also in this case without a clear parliamentary mandate), was it no longer there?
It is no coincidence, indeed precisely for this reason, that Mario Draghi was careful not to bring the ratification bill to that Parliament. There was no majority, but even if there had been, the parliamentary mandate was broader and called for negotiating the entire package, not accepting just one part. But nevertheless that signature arrived "under cover of darkness" and now Parliament has every right to put an end to that dark page.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/mes-meloni-conte/ on Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:36:48 +0000.