Romano Prodi endorses the letter from PD leader Elly Schlein to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. And he rejects the words of Young Democrats secretary Virginia Libero: "I don't know how a position of this kind can be reconciled with the party's policy."
Libero, last Sunday in Reggio Emilia, on the closing day of the national Festa dell'Unità, delivered a speech from the stage that has been at the centre of controversy and criticism for days, including within the Democratic Party: "We say it loudly: we will not be the soldiers of your wars. If these right-wing forces lead us into a real conflict, you go to arms. Because we will organise the deserters."
"When I heard her," Prodi added on Radio24, "I said I hope she grows, because if there is someone who has always fought for peace it is me, but here we find ourselves facing a very clear choice, a policy made necessary by a series of circumstances that have unleashed an incredible war."
"A position of this kind," he concluded, "I don't know how it can be reconciled with the party's policy. I believe this is a statement outside the framework that the PD is pursuing, therefore a proposal that does not belong to the PD and that has never even been discussed within the PD, as far as I know. Let's take it as a slip of the tongue, as Topo Gigio would say."
The former Prime Minister finds Schlein's letter to Meloni, published by Repubblica and poorly received by coalition allies M5S and AVS, commendable: "Schlein's proposal is an absolutely sensible proposal."
"The content of the proposal," he observed, "is in my opinion quite sound because we have an impressive national emergency that affects everyone."
