AGI – Italy “is entitled to a vice president and a portfolio of great importance“. This is the message with which the deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, leaves the EPP pre-summit before the informal dinner of EU leaders on top appointments. “We are a founding country. We have an important role to play. I believe that Italy is entitled to a vice presidency and a non-second-level portfolio”, explained the leader of Forza Italia to journalists. However, he does not yet go into detail about the delegations. “We will talk about it after the president of the Commission has been chosen by vote. Then negotiations will take place with the various states. Everyone will ask. But Italy cannot fail to have a vice president, as it has always been. Now a mistake has been made not to claim the vice presidency: I was twice commissioner under the Berlusconi governments, I was twice vice president of the European Commission. So it must be asked why Italy has the right to have it as a founding country, as a great country of the European Union and I believe it deserves to also have a high profile commissioner”, he insists.
Tajani – at the end of a meeting that lasted a couple of hours – confirms the names of the EPP: “Ursula von der Leyen for the presidency of the Commission and Roberta Metsola for the presidency of the European Parliament, and for five years not just two and a half” . This is because “the EPP won the elections and both the socialists and the liberals must take this into account”, he highlighted. The box of presidency of the European Council go to the socialists, probably to the former Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Costa, even “if anyone fears he is not firm enough on the Ukrainian question”.
Instead the High Representative goes to the Liberals. “The important thing is that the High Representative takes into account the problems of the eastern border, but he must also take into account the problems of the South. It is therefore important to have a High Representative who certainly cannot underestimate what is happening on the eastern borders, the war in Ukraine but we must also take into account what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening in Southern Europe”, is the other clarification from the head of the Farnesina.
Other names, like that of Mario Draghi, “they are part of the totonomi of the newspapers that have never been talked about”. Regarding the majority, the leader of Forza Italia reiterates that he prefers the conservatives “who are not ID” to the Greens “to whom no concessions can be made”.
