Speech of Silvio Berlusconi, 24/10/2012

For the love of Italy one can do crazy and wise things. Eighteen years ago I entered the field, a madness not without wisdom: I now prefer to take a step back for the same reasons of love that led me to move then.
Not ripresenterò my candidacy Premier but I remain alongside younger must play and score goals. I still have good muscles and a bit 'of the head, but what I expect is to give advice, offer memory, tell and judge without intrusiveness.


With primary elections open the People of Freedom by December we will know who will be my successor, after a serene and free competition between different personalities and different ideas cemented by common values. The movement will set a date in the near future (I suggest that of 16 December), will be Italians who believe in the individual and in his natural rights, in political and civil liberties before the state, democratically open a new page of history new, that we did together, men and women, from January 1994 to present.


They will do it with an endowment from the bottom in which everyone can recognize not only his dreams, as in the past, and his emotions, but also their rational choices, the representation of ideas and political interests and social reform and decisive change a country in crisis, but extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity to the history, that we can do it, you can get back to winning her battle against the Western European and inordinate ambitions of others and one's vices. We were referred to disparagingly populist and anti-political of the first hour.


We were in fact supporters of the idea of ​​alternating driving state supported by the popular vote won by persuasion that creates consensus. We have built an Italy where not reign for virtue lobbying and media or for winning a competition in the judiciary or in public administration. This reform "populist" is the most important in the history of the hundred and fifty years of unity of the country, he made us get out of a state of subjection to the political parties and nomenclatures immutable and has paved the way for a new confidence in the Republic.


I am personally proud and conscious of the limits of my work and the collective work we have undertaken, to have made the reform of the reforms making alive, vibrant and exciting participation of citizens in public life. This could only have a price, the drift towards ideologies and feelings of personal aversion towards denigration and discredit partisan who did the good of Italy. But this syndrome eventually proved paralyzing we finally come out with the responsible choice, made just a year ago with a lot of pain but with equal awareness, to entrust the leadership of the country provisionally, pending the general election, the senator and coach Mario Monti, expression a country that has never wanted to join the witch-hunt.


The Prime Minister and his team have done what they could, that is a lot, in the institutional situation, parliamentary and domestic policy, and in European and global conditions in which our economy and our society have faced great financial crisis of debt . Mistakes were made, some serviceable starting from the corrections to the law of stability and some fiscal measures are wrong, but the direction of reform and liberal was essentially clear. And with the progress of the facts Italy is at work to stem with a sense of responsibility and courage the neo-colonial ambitions that some European circles grow about a restructuring of the national powers in the European Union. Our future is in a stronger Union and interdependent, in a free market and a free trade illuminated by common rules that go beyond national borders, in a reaffirmation of sovereignty that is at one with his second orderly sharing rules of equality and equity between nations and peoples. This can not be dispersed.


Continuity with reform efforts began eighteen years ago is in serious jeopardy. A leftist coalition that wants to go back to the logic of centralized planner who produced the mountain of public debt and the explosion of the country's corporate and lazy that we know, asked to rule with a bevy of party professionals educated and trained in the old egalitarian ideologies , solidarist and collectivist twentieth century. Is the People of Freedom, the Secretary Angelino Alfano, and a younger generation that reproduce the miracle of 1994, giving a serious and demanding battle to stop this drift.
