“Schlein is wrong about the abuse of office, repeal is the only solution”. Talk about Amato

“To avoid flooding the courts with useless processes and save the bureaucracy from the terror of signatures with authorizations and permissions that remain blocked for months I think repeal of the abuse of office is the way forwardthe government’s choice is correct, and moreover it is the one that the mayors, including those of the Democratic Party, have been indicating for some time”. Alessio D’Amato, councilor for health of the Lazio Region at the time of the pandemicdefeated candidate for the presidency and today councilor dem alla Pisana, sides with the front of the mayors and invites the Democratic Party to have a more courageous attitude and, without hesitation, support the government’s choice to repeal the abuse of office.

Inside the party mayorsfrom the president of Anci and mayor of Bari Antonio Decaro to the mayor of Pesaro Matteo Ricci, I’m in favor of the solution. Elisabetta Gualmini, MEP and former vice-president of Emilia-Romagna, underlines it on Twitter: “It was our mayors who asked for a profound revision. We cannot be the ones to dispute, no one would understand”. Even the Campania governor Vincenzo De Luca praised the government’s choice: “it is important and positive”. However, the official line of the Democratic Party was dictated by the secretariat of Elly Schlein: right to review the abuse of office as the first dem citizens ask, but not to repeal it. “I fear that reviewing the abuse of office to correct its distortions – says D’Amato – is operationally and technically very complicated. Many attempts – he continues – have been made, the last one in 2020 by the Conte government, yet the numbers show how things have not changed, for this very reason I think that the choice to intervene at the source, canceling the crime, is the only possible”.

However, there are those who say that this is not the case. Even a prince of the forum, one of Silvio Berlusconi’s former lawyers, like Fausto Coppi he does not see the choice as decisive: “It will mean that the prosecutors will proceed for corruption, and instead of abuse we will have corruption. It doesn’t strike me as a big display of wits,” she declared this morning. A similar idea is also circulating in the Democratic Party. For example, the senator said so this afternoon Alfredo Bazoli to the Agi: “There is the risk that this void will be filled by the judges through the extension of other types of crime. A citizen who feels damaged by the public administration, even in the absence of the specific crime, would not give up turning to the judiciary which, for his part, will in any case have to open files ”. “Abstractly I understand this concern – says the former councilor D’Amato – but a crime such as corruption is more difficult to hypothesize, there must be a corrupt person, a corruptor and a donation of money”.

In the Democratic Party there are also those, such as the person in charge of the Reforms and the Pnrr of the Schlein secretariat Alexander Alfieri who claims it is necessary to “be cautious” because, he says: “The draft EU directive on corruption provides for the crime of abuse of office. That rule can be narrowed down, typified, but the impact that the government reform could have on the implementation of the Pnrr must be assessed”. For D’Amato the only possible impact is positive. “On the Pnrr – he says – we are already late, the abolition of this rule could favor the grounding of the planned worksand let no one say that there are no controls, because starting from the accounting ones, they will all still be foreseen”.