Bruxelles – First day of Ilaria Salis and Mimmo Lucano at the European Parliament where they claimed to want to carry on their battles. The new MEPs from the Left group, elected in Italy with the Green Alliance and the Italian Left, showed up today (26 June) at the Brussels headquarters of the European Parliament. Accompanying Salis and Lucano was there Nicholas Fratoiannileader of the Italian Left.
A symbolic first day that coincides with the return of an Italian delegation within the Left group. In this regard, Nicola Fratoianni focused on the “important result achieved in Italy that allows us to bring our themes to Europe, namely peace, ecological transition, social justice, protection of fundamental rights, of the most fragile and of migrants”.
Despite the election, Ilaria Salis’s judicial case in Hungary is not over, also because Budapest could ask the European Chamber for the withdrawal of parliamentary immunity. Despite this, the new MEP says she is optimistic because: “I don’t want to run away from justice, I hope that the European Parliament takes sides in defense of fundamental rights, the presumption of innocence and the principle of proportionality”.
Salis and Lucano said they were ready to fight their own battles within the European Parliament: for the first, particular attention to the protection of the poorest and to the housing issue, while for the second, migration issues. In this regard, Lucano took today’s opportunity to harshly criticize Italy on the management of immigrant people: “I want to imagine being able to be an alternative to the deportations with which the Italian government has intended to manage immigration in recent periods, but even in Europe there is an involution in immigration laws”. Neither Lucano nor Salis have expressed their intention to vote towards the increasingly probable second Von der Leyen commission: both because they first have to discuss it together with the Left group and because as Salis underlined: “I have just arrived, I still have to understand how it works” .
