For Lorenzo Bugli (PDCS), citizens have already chosen the path of association with the European Union by voting, for four consecutive legislatures, for majorities that put it at the heart of their programmes.
Speaking today, Monday 9 November, in the Foreign Affairs Committee, the councillor responded to Fabio Righi‘s call for a referendum, defending the process that led up to the signing of the agreement. He then turned to the work ahead to make the most of the opportunities the deal offers, pointing to the insurance sector as one area ripe for development.
“The previous speech immediately pushes me to talk about the past. I wanted to talk about the future, not least because that is the spirit of the Association Agreement with the European Union: looking ahead to the future of a country that has finally managed to set out on a path wanted by four governments and by every political party sitting in this chamber, which together spent twelve years negotiating to reach the signing.
If I am to follow the logic of the speaker before me, then for these twelve years everyone was drunk, everyone was out of their mind when they wrote the programmes on which they won the votes to govern this country as the majority.
Was everyone mad? Did the people who voted for them not know what was in those programmes either? This is yet another flawed narrative being put forward in this chamber.
I would expect a different attitude, but, as Commissioner Renzi also said from the opposition benches, we have to accept these democratic ways of reasoning.
What I cannot accept, however, is an inaccurate narrative: the claim that citizens must now have their say on this issue. Citizens have already had their say, for four legislatures running, by voting for majorities whose very first programme point was the conclusion of the Association Agreement with the European Union. Citizens have already voted on this issue.
A referendum is not possible because our Declaration on the Rights of Citizens prohibits referendums on multilateral matters, just as the constitutions of many European states provide.
It is a question of a state’s reputation to put into question matters concerning multilateral agreements, because there are steps involved that touch on the credibility of states that make commitments to other parties.
That is why these matters cannot be put to a referendum.
I know this makes me unpopular here, because people always say citizens must be involved, but when doing politics one must also be clear and, yes, pedagogical: certain things simply cannot be done, full stop.
Is a council-initiated referendum provided for? Very well, let Righi propose it — the whole chamber will reject it. If in future we want to assess what this agreement will have brought to the Republic, and revisit that political choice made by four governments, that is a different matter altogether, one that opens up another debate to be tackled later.
Politics cannot predict the future; it must govern the present, and governing the present requires responsibility. Today we must exercise that responsibility by focusing on the matter at hand: San Marino’s future within the Association Agreement.
Otherwise it’s like students sitting a university exam and saying: ‘I won’t pass.’
How are you supposed to graduate that way?
You have to start working, start studying, and see something through to completion.
If we approach things with this generic pessimism, typical of social media, of those hundred or so voices claiming the agreement is a disaster, that migrants are coming — we keep going back to the same issues that, agreement in hand, have already been explained away as non-existent.
And yet that would supposedly represent the population: a hundred people on social media, out of an electorate of more than fourteen thousand, say it’s no good, and suddenly it’s treated as a problem.
Let’s start being serious, because politics must also be pedagogical.
The Secretary did very well to strengthen communication about the agreement through websites, social media and all the media work now required of us. But politics must take one further step, and this is something I take from the speaker before me.
It must do so given the sheer volume of work ahead, but above all because it is being asked to turn into reality the great opportunities this agreement gives us.
That is the point: it offers us a significant number of opportunities. There are entire pages of the agreement — but you have to actually read it, because many people skip that step — that allow for the development of whole sectors of the Republic. Let me give a practical example that also affects me professionally: the insurance sector. It has an entire blank page still to be written, an enormous opportunity.
Earlier there was talk of finance and the banking sector: the insurance sector could have its own regulation, an extremely intelligent and advantageous one, creating a new pillar of San Marino’s economy.
Just as with insurance, there are other blank pages that the foresight of those four governments — and I repeat this because evidently we are not understanding each other — has left open to be developed later, with all the particular features of our Republic as a microstate.
The whole country voted for those governments.
We have the ability to carve out, within the European landscape, a space like that of the great small states of the European Union, which thanks to the Union have managed to become economic reference points. Let’s start looking at the files in front of us with some positivity, instead of constantly asking ourselves, fearfully, what might go wrong. This pessimism keeps pushing people further away from political life.
Let’s bring politics back to devising, creating, developing and thinking, because that is what is required of it: to be pedagogical, to be a place where laboratories of ideas are born. Not everything can already be decided in advance. Costs and benefits, fine, but enough — let’s actually start thinking things through.
Let’s start seizing the opportunities of this agreement again because, as Renzi rightly said, certain steps, even with our neighbour Italy, necessarily had to go through the Association Agreement. This is the most important point: our country’s sovereignty runs through it. Today, with that agreement, we are more sovereign. Let’s seize the opportunities and put an end to this pessimism and these alarmist, out-of-this-world claims.”
