Gaetano Troina (D-ML) spoke during item 21 of the agenda of the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale), dedicated to the revision of the State and public bodies’ budget forecast for the 2026 financial year. Below is his full statement.
Gaetano Troina (D-ML): I will close this debate by expanding on some of the points raised by colleagues who spoke before me, but above all by stressing something we keep repeating every time we discuss the budget and budget revisions — at least over the past year: the lack of planning and vision when it comes to future projects of real significance for our country.
In the past, at least in recent years, the budget and its revisions were the tools that both majority and opposition used to put forward proposals and outline initiatives that, in the short or long term, would affect the public.
Last year, in order to bypass the gridlock that could arise from marathon debates both in autumn and during the December budget session, you came up with the so-called “development law,” which unfortunately turned out to be anything but a development law.
After that initiative failed, you have essentially stopped using legislative tools to outline or present projects in this chamber.
Honestly, this is starting to become a real problem, because we keep hearing about projects — some even grandiose, important, or at least significant for our country — through the newspapers or committee briefings, without the slightest explanation of the details, the timeline, or where the funding will come from.
Citizens are essentially left waiting to find out more, with no idea when that might happen. I’ll mention a few examples, and I bring them up at every opportunity because the political majority and the government still haven’t given us an answer: the water basin promised in the Torello area, and the plans to secure electricity supply both through the Visano plant and the new facility.
These are all initiatives and projects that have only been announced and proclaimed in this chamber, without a single supporting document.
Months go by, and — moving on to the second part of my remarks — we keep seeing a steady rise in spending every time we discuss the State budget.
Something doesn’t add up here, because if spending were rising in line with the start of work on these infrastructure projects, we would understand it. Instead, we only see spending increase without any corresponding start of works or realization of projects for our Republic.
On the expenditure side, I continue to see, for example, an increase of nearly 20 million in current spending. I see that total expenditure, compared to what was originally forecast, has indeed decreased slightly — but some revenue items related to loans and borrowing have also decreased.
We’re looking at 50 million less, 40 million less in expected incoming funds compared to what was forecast.
It’s not easy to make sense of data presented this way, and there’s no doubt that we continue to spend significant public resources.
Some colleagues rightly pointed out that 2 million euros have been earmarked for the issue related to the arbitration case in Washington. Here too, I find myself very much in agreement with what was said before me.
Is it right — and the answer, obviously, is no — that citizens, the community as a whole, through their various tax payments, should have to cover what the State will spend because of a matter that has nothing to do with sound state management? Why must the public always pay for the mistakes made by politicians?
This situation, already hard to accept when the economy in general is doing well, becomes simply unbearable at a time when people are struggling.
People are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to cover their monthly expenses, and yet we keep asking them — through higher IGR taxes, rising energy costs, and countless increases that occur almost every month — for more resources, always more resources, which in the end are used to pay for mistakes made by someone else.
In this country — though it’s a problem with politics in general — when someone makes a mistake, instead of coming here to apologize and say “I was wrong,” they make the citizens pay for it.
It’s the easy way out. But where is the accountability of those who actually made the mistakes?
You can’t just say, “At the next election, citizens will decide and remember who made the mistakes.” That’s too convenient, because meanwhile the State’s resources have already been spent this way, and political responsibility gets reduced to a few more or fewer votes at the next election.
In the meantime, though, the money is gone. It cannot be that no one in this country ever pays for their mistakes. That is not a message we can allow to stand.
