During the communications item on the agenda of the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale), Matteo Zeppa (Rete) spoke about the rise of ultranationalist right-wing movements in Europe, linking the issue to San Marino’s own political and economic situation. In his address he also touched on the banking system, the Government’s policy guidelines for 2027, and the case of the “international airport” sign at the Torraccia airfield. His full remarks follow.
Matteo Zeppa (Rete): When the far right re-emerges from the deep catacombs where recent history had rightly confined it, it never comes bearing visions of the future — instead it digs up old, toxic notions founded on the presumed superiority of one ethnicity over others, clumsily disguising them as something new. When the idea of possible state funerals for the genocidal Ratko Mladić is floated, it means it is already too late. Honours for whom, I ask? For a criminal guilty of the Srebrenica massacre, who planned the killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims? For the man responsible for the siege of Sarajevo, a campaign of pure terror that caused the deaths of roughly 12,000 civilians, and for systematic ethnic cleansing? The news, moreover, gives us a fact that should make our blood run cold: the electoral surge and victory of the ultranationalist right in Germany. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, a force whose ideological roots lie in territory we hoped had been sealed forever in those catacombs has returned and won decisively. This raises deeply troubling questions about the very resilience of democratic systems, which must now reckon with what is viscerally antithetical to them: anti-democracy. It is a threat that first legitimises itself through free elections and then locks institutions in an authoritarian grip. All of this happens when politics abdicates its regulatory role and gives in to the temptation to normalise extremism. And Mario Monti’s warning at Cernobbio is a lucid one: united Europe, he says, was founded precisely to defeat nationalism. We are talking about the very same Europe that is soon expected to welcome us as a third country alongside Andorra — and which certain domestic quarters instead sabotage and undermine on a daily basis. Let’s be honest: even within these 61 square kilometres there exists a creeping chauvinist, nationalist mindset, a stubborn and ridiculous defence of some supposed purity that has nothing to do with our history as a — one has to wonder, at this point — land of freedom and welcome. But we are not living under a glass dome, and while the world’s far right organises itself and comes brazenly out of hiding, we are witnessing, in parallel, a worrying domestic normalisation made up of arrogant rhetoric, opaque methods and, above all, economic recipes that reek of the old, the stale, of failures already lived through. And this drift has no single political colour. It is infuriating to see that even the solemn anniversary of 28 July — the day fascism fell on Titano — has been sadly reduced to a mere self-congratulatory parade for the supposed left-wing forces in government; forces that, while sitting at the helm in the highest institutional roles, hypocritically continue to talk about anti-politics, pointing the finger at the civic movements born in 2012, using the spectre of anti-politics, among other things, to cover their own glaring shortcomings and hide the obvious truth: that they have perfectly adapted to and assimilated into that very same rotten system of power. Some, from these very microphones, call for a new season of moral reckoning, but morality in this Chamber seems to have been reduced to a haute-couture outfit for the catwalk: worn in front of the cameras to gather applause, then discarded a second later amid the horse-trading logic of power. There can be no moral authority when the sermon comes from those who have turned consistency into a shabby bargaining chip for their own political survival. How is it possible that the entire Chamber looked on in tomb-like, complicit silence as the so-called Bulgarian group made its move on the beating heart of our banking system? There has still been no answer. This was a reckless financial penetration, permitted and endorsed by short-sighted minds — including Sammarinese figures — ready to sell off the country’s economic sovereignty for murky interests, just to preserve a precarious factional political-economic balance. This is not the development of the future; this is the bankruptcy liquidation of the Republic. The enormous risk is sliding down a slippery slope back towards that disastrous era of “San Marino da bere” [“San Marino to be drunk”, the free-wheeling boom years] of the 1990s and 2000s: a season of monetary illusions, regulatory shortcuts, fraudulent triangulations, of a system entirely pervaded by financial flows of dubious origin. A season we paid for at an enormous price, with decades of media mud-slinging, blacklisting, and sacrifices, tears and blood imposed on citizens to restore San Marino’s honour in the eyes of the world. If you want proof that this Executive’s mentality is identical to that of those dark years — seeking budgetary stability not through structural innovation but through reckless economic gambling — just look at the guidelines of the 2027 economic programme. Buried in the Government’s official document, one reads verbatim: “Among the lines of development for 2027, particular importance may also be given to exploring new project areas linked to the gaming sector in international contexts, including the assessment of initiatives related to gaming activities in international waters.” We are talking about floating casinos, gaming ships on the high seas, a return to that thrill-seeking economy, smoke and mirrors to hide the utter void of ideas in this Executive. The historical truth is that when you play with the fire of regulatory shortcuts, you always end up getting burned. This official policy text reveals and demonstrates that behind the stale rhetoric of transparency lies only a desperate hunger to raise cash at any cost — even at the cost of digging up the darkest seasons of our history. The right advancing across Europe brutally erases rights. The right governing San Marino, led hand in hand by those who hypocritically call themselves left-wing, risks permanently erasing our international credibility, hurling us back thirty years. Colleagues, the choice before us is dramatically simple, almost banal in how obvious it is: either the Europe of rights, transparency and structural development, or a return to media mud, blacklists and thrill-seeking economics. This Executive prefers the easier path, a convenient choice that fits perfectly with the demagogic proposals found in the platforms of those European ultranationalist right-wing parties that today are taking root so widely and so dangerously. Because those right-wing forces, exactly like this Government, do not sell visions of the future — they sell cut-price illusions. They feed on the rejection of shared rules to legitimise financial anarchy and wild deregulation. There is a symbiotic bond between their identity-based nationalism and this economic decline: both thrive on hunting external enemies to hide, once again, the utter void of their own ideas. I believe we are approaching a reckoning. Let me close with one example. It is astonishing that there is no longer even any awareness of the role one holds, when, at the Torraccia airfield, a sign reading “international airport” is put up right around the time of the Holy Father’s arrival. After that, no one can explain who authorised it, how, or when — if any authorisation was even given at all. The sign is then covered up, and when someone asks about it on social media — which by now have become tabloid gossip sheets — the president of the airfield says it was “Topo Gigio” [an Italian puppet character, akin to blaming a cartoon mouse]. I believe we have truly hit rock bottom in terms of respect for the role one holds, and in the sense that some people treat parts or portions of our territory as their own private property. I believe this is nothing but a mirror of what I said in my remarks. Unfortunately, we have become a social class, a nihilistic population that looks no further than the end of its own nose and stubbornly focuses on its own survival, without the slightest planning or awareness of what the development of our nation will actually look like.
