Falcomatà investigated, Pazzano (La Strada): “In Reggio, a moral question as big as the city. But without radical change, the dissolution will be useless”

“’They’re all the same, left and right, nothing will ever change.’ Cut with an axe, but this is the phrase that occurs most these days in Reggio. The profound resignation of a cultural coma. The classic night in which all the cows are black, in which everyone is the same, in which “there is nothing”. Regardless of the legal matter, which will have its outcome, in Reggio there is a moral issue as big as the entire city. It’s the most classic case of the ‘elephant in the room’ that we pretend not to see.”

“More than three years ago now, when the story of the alleged fraud with The street we strongly requested that an investigative commission be activated, as possible by the municipal statute. A Commission – continues Pazzano – that could evaluate, among other things, on a political-administrative level the possible spread of the malpractice of city councilors and candidates who go and ask for dozens of duplicates of voter ID cards for their voters; the possible malpractice of municipal councilors and candidates who go to check the votes collected, seat by seat, effectively limiting the secrecy of the vote, because then I go to see if I’m missing your vote in the polling station…; the possible phenomenon of city councilors and candidates fighting to have ‘trusted’ polling station presidents and scrutineers…

Nobody followed us in this request, we were not even able to collect the six signatures for the opening of the Commission to be discussed. And to think that the same people who didn’t even consider it then are now asking for the Access Commission.

You might say: eh, but the facts are different. No, dear and dear. The facts are in the same context and if we had been able to delve deeper into the issue in the correct institutional setting, noting the administrative and political responsibilities, today the entire council could address what is happening with the dignity of being able to say: we have activated all the tools in time to represent citizens who want clarity, transparency, participation. But city dynamics follow electoral balances and never have the vision of those who plan a new political phase, one of rupture or at least of discontinuity.

The situation in Reggio is terrible. We are in the hottest days of a profound resignation, which has its roots in past years. A resignation prior to the dissolution of 2012 and to which this administration, as repeatedly said on many other occasions, has not been able or willing to give a prospect of change. The picture that emerges in these hours is and will remain disheartening, even if there is evidence of any extraneousness to the disputed facts.

There remains the trace – adds the councilor of the ‘La Strada’ group – of a sub-cultural model which is precisely the one expressed in Berlinguer’s famous moral question, in which, in the absence of a prospective political vision, one rather becomes administrators of currents, of camarillas. But this would not be possible if, by now, there were not a society ready to accept this and in which: many people, as Berlinguer said, ‘are very aware of the commercialization that has taken place for more than twenty years, of the oppression, of the favoritism of discrimination. But most of them are under blackmail. They have received advantages (perhaps due, but obtained only through the channels of local politicians and their currents) or they hope to receive them, or they fear they will no longer receive them.

If thousands of citizens are not willing to remove those who promise anything in exchange for the vote; if thousands of individuals do not vote by their own choice and not because the candidate ‘is brought to you’ and for this reason you cannot say no; if there isn’t a radical change in the principle of gray self-preservation of certain groups of Reggio professionals then it will just be a matter – dissolution or no dissolution – of jumping from one pan to another pan.

If the parties and movements are unable to renew and select a ruling class capable of excluding those who promise packages of votes; a ruling class that is capable of abandoning and overcoming feudal occupation methods and approaches to government; a ruling class capable of fully attacking the moral question by going to its political causes, then it will only be a matter – access fee or not – of moving from one ember to another.

And the ‘Ndrangheta? ‘He’s not invincible at all. It is a human fact and like all human facts it has a beginning, and it will also have an end’.

We need to remove the clientelistic context into which it can be grafted. This is the challenge I need to overcome. Or even in the next elections the city will sink with even greater resignation.

This is the challenge that this municipal administration should demonstrate that it at least wanted to play. Can you do it?”, concludes Pazzano.