Regionals, Berlusconi pushes Fontana and criticizes Putin: “Absurd nuclear hypothesis” – Corriere.it

«In these five years we have seen everything you have done and we have seen that you have put your competence, experience and great work capacity into play. I’m absolutely sure you will win and we will win.” This was said by Silvio Berlusconi, addressing the Northern League president of the Lombardy Region Attilio Fontana, during a meeting organized by Forza Italia at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan. “We cannot think of handing over a region like ours to the alliance between the Five Stars and the Democratic Party”, continued the former premier, “two forces with a very confused identity, united only by a generic leftist matrix and by the fear of suffer, as they will suffer, an absolute defeat. As for Forza Italia: «I am sure that the Lombard voters want to confirm Forza Italia, this is our region, this is where the bet from which it all began. We are heirs to the great liberal, Atlanticist and Christian tradition of our country”.

«The centre-right has governed Lombardy for almost 30 years», Berlusconi recalled, “among all the governors who have followed one another let me remember with emotion my friend Roberto Maroni who left us too soon, I carry him in my heart with great affection”. Speaking of himself, however, the former prime minister recalled that he had “not taken on any institutional role in the government, even if I deserved it, even thinking about the fall I made”, he recounted, “the doctors told me that they are I’m alive by a miracle and maybe it will pass, but I did the electoral campaign anyway”.

Then Berlusconi addressed the issue of the war going on in Europe. «The one in Ukraine is a war that gives rise to absurd hypotheses of the use of nuclear weapons» as done by «Putin four days ago. Europe must coordinate its military forces, its defense forces”. After having recalled 2002 in Pratica di Mare «with our extraordinary foreign policy we managed to get the Russian Federation, the United States and all the NATO countries to sign a treaty that led to the end of the cold war that had been worrying us for the most 50 years old», Berlusconi acknowledged how at the time, including Putin, all European countries were in agreement for Moscow’s integration into the EU, «except for France and Germany who opposed fearing, one must rightly say, that entry ».