The leaders signed the Quirinal Treaty in Rome the premier: “Common security complementary to NATO”
S.holding hands, Sergio Mattarella, Mario Draghi and Emmanuel Macron, after having signed the Quirinale treaty. It was inevitable that the personal destinies of the three protagonists would also cross over on this agreement. In fact, none of those present who applaud is able to say whether in a few months the President of the Republic will still be at the Quirinale, if the premier will be at Palazzo Chigi or will have moved to Colle, and if the French president will be at the Elysée after the vote of April.
From this provisional nature emerges the Treaty which aspires to replicate the precedent of the 1963 Elysée, the one that welded the Franco-German axis, making it the pivot of Europe. With the same ambition, the “enhanced bilateral cooperation” agreement collects many historical challenges in twelve articles: the common European defense, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa as cradle, geopolitical horizon, need for security, the Stability Pact as economic rigor rule overtaken by the virus. Alliances and partnerships that cool disputes and divergences that have lasted for years on a commercial and political level. In the values there is shared culture, literature, cinema, the memory of Valeria Solesin, victim of the Bataclan massacre, honored by Draghi. More specifically, the two countries promise each other: investments and joint research on aerospace (starting from the agreement on launchers signed yesterday), an Italian-French civil service, coordination and exchange in police operations, greater protection of interests Italians in the agri-food sector. This and more. “The deepest meaning of the Treaty – says Draghi – is that our sovereignty, understood as the ability to direct the future, can be strengthened through a shared management of common challenges”. “Sovereignty” is the word snatched from the sovereignists that cement each passage in the speech of the two champion leaders of Europeanism. There are no misunderstandings, Draghi warns: it is a pact that aims to strengthen the Union. “We are looking for European sovereignty” but “to be sovereign Europe must know how to defend its borders and create a true European defense”, “complementary to NATO and not a substitute”.
It is the first big goal. In the background is the mess of Afghanistan, but there is also Russia knocking with tanks on the doors of Ukraine and Europe. European military independence was one of Macron’s dreams at the dawn of his five-year mandate at the Elysée. It will now be at the top of the agenda of the current French presidency of the EU which starts in January, and will also return to the center of its electoral campaign against the nationalists of France along with the revision of the Stability Pact. Draghi’s sentence seems unappealable: “Those budget rules had already proved their inadequacy”. So if their revision was necessary, after the pandemic “it is inevitable”. Draghi and Macron know the scale of the challenge. They know who a hand will come from or, conversely, the biggest obstacle. The German business daily Handelsblatt is alarmed as to whether the “Dracron” pact aims at “a Europe of Italian-French debt”. And at the finance ministry of the newly formed coalition government, the Italian prime minister will find the liberal Christian Lindner, austerity ultrà, an old adversary from the days in which he led the ECB.
But it is also sulla keeping of goals of the kind that the tenacity of the agreement will be measured. As on migration policies, beyond the good intentions of solidarity expressed in the text. The “storm,” Macron says, is over. These are the tears of Italian hyperpopulism against Paris, when Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio shared the spotlight of the Conte I government. Di Maio is now sitting in the seats of honor, as Foreign Minister applauds the agreement, regretting the days which went to honor the yellow vests. But misunderstandings about Libya, suspicions about financial transactions, conflicts over migrants also contributed to the storm. It will be “the discipline of friendship”, Macron promises, to force the two governments “to speak often and to act together.” There will be an annual intergovernmental summit, discussions before each summit. Draghi then asked and obtained that an Italian minister take part in a French government meeting three times a year and vice versa. One more step in the direction of the Franco-German format which provides for the convening of a common council of ministers. None of the Italian negotiators, least of all Draghi, who also has a very close relationship with Macron, has ever deluded himself to oust the Germans. It is no coincidence that the French president says he heard Merkel in the morning, before the signing: «In France – he adds – it is said that when things go badly with Germany, we look to Italy. It does not work like this: Europe is built at 27, we must not look for substitutes for one or the other in the various alliances “
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