“We ask the newly elected Regional Council of Basilicata which meets today for the first time in the new legislature to immediately put the issue of differentiated autonomy on the agenda and to immediately withdraw support for this bill which will further penalize Basilicata and the South, undermining the unity of the country. We ask the centrists and reformists within the majority to immediately express their opinion on the merits, starting with the former governor Marcello Pittella”. This is the appeal of the general secretary of the CGIL Basilicata, Fernando Mega. “The Northern League measure against the south will overwhelm our region – he continues – and it is unacceptable that President Vito Bardi, reconfirmed at the helm of the Region, has assumed it without any political and institutional discussion. A very serious responsibility in terms of substance and method.”
The CGIL Basilicata reiterates its opposition to differentiated autonomy. “This is a project that if implemented would put national unity at risk. Implementing Article 116, third paragraph, of the Constitution in the given conditions – explains Mega – with the proposed methods and with unchanged resources, would constitute an attack on the unity of the fundamental civil and social rights of citizens, destined to expand in a irreversible existing inequalities and gaps and to further reduce the ability of the public system to guarantee essential and universal services to the population. Just as recognizing exclusive regional competence on matters of strategic importance, and not susceptible to territorial division, would represent the renunciation of a national and unitary government of the country’s economic, industrial and development policies.
We are living in a dramatically turbulent historical phase, marked by geopolitical crises that multiply rather than resolve themselves and by serious consequences on a humanitarian, economic and social level that not even the national dimension is capable of resolving. We have to face crucial challenges such as the digital transition and the urgent ecological reconversion of our production system to combat the climate crisis, and we certainly cannot do so by breaking up public policies territory by territory – warns the union leader – We believe it is profoundly wrong to undermine three pillars on which the cohesion and stability of our society is based on education and public health as well as the national collective labor agreement.
For Basilicata, where in just one year the population decreased by 0.7% (-3,591 individuals), losing 60 thousand inhabitants in twenty years with a forecast, according to Istat, of a 40% loss of current residents in the next twenty, how could we guarantee essential levels of assistance? If we add to this the recovery plan or, worse, the commissionership of Lucanian healthcare, the protection of the right to health of Lucanians is lost and, together with the right to education and the right to mobility, the right to citizenship is lost”.
Ultimately “we are convinced – concludes Mega – that only by strengthening national unity, enhancing the interdependence between the northern economy and the southern economy, strengthening public and universal welfare, and projecting ourselves as the only large “country system” in an increasingly united, we will be able to play a role in the complicated world in which we have had to live. A new distribution of matters and fundamental rights between territories which would certainly undermine many of the competences currently exercised by the individual Regions. For these reasons, we believe that all available democratic tools should be activated to prevent Italy’s prospects from being irremediably compromised. We therefore ask the regional government of Basilicata to evaluate every institutional initiative useful for this purpose, starting from the possibility of promoting, on the basis of article 127, second paragraph, of the Constitution, the question of constitutional legitimacy to protect the sphere of competence of the Region , in case differentiated autonomy became law. We also take advantage of the opportunity to publicly send our best wishes for a speedy recovery to councilor Angelo Chiorazzo who today was supposed to participate in his first session of the Lucanian parliament”.
