Orlando launches European candidacy with focus on Mediterranean centrality & inequality stop

Moral and immigration question, “true resource”. But above all the final word to the inequalities experienced by the Sicilians, the farmers and finally Mario Draghi, “who should prevail more the political soul over bureaucracy”. Leoluca Orlando presents his manifesto for the European elections: at the Florio stand the former mayor and former European parliamentarian gathers his faithful and sets off from Palermo the race that will see the finish line on the 8th and 9th of June, when citizens will be called to vote for their representatives.

“The opportunity to put a brake on the derailment of the founding principles of the EU – highlights Orlando – as a feared effect of an explosive mix constituted by the use of efficient bureaucratic machinery by a sovereign and intolerant right-wing”. For Orlando the challenge of the next European Parliament will be “the centrality of the Mediterranean – he continues – a place of mobility and closures, dialogue and conflicts, droughts and floods. Sicily and Sardinia must be protagonists and not victims of isolation, marginalization and underdevelopment. Too many inequalities are recorded in the Sicilian territory as a result of senseless choices by the current government that can be contained and overturned by a European parliament with qualified presences. The goal – continues the former mayor – is freedom from fear, of Palestinians for example, victims of a genocide, as well as migrants. Freedom from the fear of unemployed people from Palermo, of unemployed Sicilians, freedom from fear regarding violence against women, workplace accidents and entrepreneurs subject to bureaucratic performance and extortion logic”.

Leoluca Orlando points the finger at the lack of care for the territory, “which have made farmers understand that they have been victims of a perverse use of Europe, at the moment only a sedative through the contributions that have become little compared to the lack of control over the increase in production costs and the decrease in the selling price of agricultural products”. The vision is clear: it is not the responsibility of Europe, “but it must be Europe that must reverse its position – Orlando emphasizes – to move from a contribution logic, always necessary, to an adequate control over selling prices and production costs. We live in a paradoxical condition: we leave thousands of lakes abandoned, where dredging and maintenance are not carried out, wasting water. And farmers are exploited as a maneuvering mass for consensus: the more precarious you are, the worse off you are, the more you need my help. This perverse mechanism is called clientele”.