SAN MARINO – The DC councilor Lorenzo Bugli intervenes on the EU and referendums. “I haven’t written for a long time, and perhaps it was a good thing: words that are spent needlessly end up consuming themselves. But the debate that opened during the Freedom Festival on 28 July, between Libera and PSD, convinced me that it is worth breaking this silence, at least for an afternoon in August.
On that occasion, the General Secretary of the CSdL, Enzo Merlini, proposed a referendum to verify the Association Agreement with the European Union: not immediately, but a few years after its entry into force. It is an idea that was born, one senses, more to respond to the voices of those who have been agitating the issue for months – Motus Liberi in the lead, and some citizens’ committees who declare themselves dissatisfied without always saying what – than from a real conviction of merit.
However, this is not the point I would like to focus on. For a long time political confrontation it has the habit of transforming every important choice into a fan rally: referendum yes, referendum no, now or in two years, as if the moment of the vote counted more than its content. It’s a convenient way of not looking at the substance of things in the face. And the essence here is that the Association Agreement is not a technical detail to be discussed lightly: it is the condition of our political life and economic stability in the coming decades. Those who don’t understand this condemn themselves to a speculative exercise, good only for measuring who knows how to appear more populist than the other.
The real enemy, if we really have to look for one, is not the referendum. It’s time. The time that the Republic let pass for years, before arriving at an agreement which today serves to protect 80-90% of San Marino exports directed towards the European Union, and which regulations designed only for third countries – the EUDR, to give a concrete example – make it more difficult for our businesses to sustain every day.
It is the time that our children spend in a thousand tricks to study or work outside the borders, when they are not forced to give it up completely due to lack of European citizenship. It is the time that we could, finally, use to rewrite entire pages of our economy: fully recognized as a European system, but capable of maintaining a slenderness that could make us not a small double of Italy, but a more agile and advanced complement. It’s time to strengthen a banking system that is still suffering of its errors and limitationsto simplify the little things – private shipments, daily practices – which weigh on families more than “big politics” is willing to admit.
If we don’t understand all this, we risk discussing topics that have nothing to do with a negotiated agreement for more than a decade by four Governments, supported by all parliamentary forces – including those who today find themselves more Eurosceptic than they were at the time of the vote – and built, patiently, from our country.
From this perspective, I look with interest at the proposal launched in recent days on San Marino RTV by my fellow councilor Gerardo Giovagnoli, who suggested opening a new phase of the Mixed Commission on the EU Agreement. The name matters less than the substance: let’s call it the Implementation Commission, if it helps to understand. To date, that Commission has carried out a preparatory task, updating the political and social forces in view of the transition to the EFTA and COREPER bodies. But the signature is now upon us, and the phase that opens is of a different nature: it is the one in which it must implementannex by annex, an agreement that so far we have discussed mainly in its principles. A work that will necessarily have to intersect with that of the Foreign Affairs Commissions, and with a close comparison with Italy, to which the our community remains, and will remain, inextricably linked.
The real challenge, I was saying, is not the referendum. It is knowing how to translate into daily practice what is today called, somewhat emphatically, the year zero of our Republic. In reality, we are not at a starting or arrival point. We are in a moment of epochal transition. If we don’t know how to seize this opportunity, now that Almost everything is redesigned, then we won’t need any referendum: it will be enough, with more simplicity, to invoke the clause that allows a State to leave the agreement when it wishes.
Let us reflect, then, every time we pronounce the word Europe. It is not worth measuring ourselves against the support of the countries around us, involved in matches that respond to different logics from ours. We will not become a Member State but rather associated: an unprecedented condition, which allows you not to suffer pressures European countries, but to tailor them for San Marino.
It is to this reflection, rather than an appeal, that I would like to invite those who in recent weeks take a break under the umbrella or in the mountains: the next challenge, including the electoral one, will be won on quality And there competence, not on the friend of a friend or on the cousin who for years believed he could do without both. Only the quality and competence, after all, they know beat the time. The fans, no,” he concludes Lorenzo Bugli Councilor of San Marino Christian Democratic Party
