“You were right.” Peppe Provenzano, deputy and head of foreign affairs of the national secretariat of the Democratic Party, thus closed the chapter of the relationship with Cateno De Luca in front of the audience of the provincial federation. He said this in the interview with Manuela Modica of La Sicilia which opened the final afternoon of the provincial Unity Festival at Villa Dante, claiming to have always supported that it was necessary to be alternative.
Provenzano reserved his harshest judgment for the regional government: «At the moment in Sicily the moral question is an entirely political question. It has to do with a system of gathering and building consensus fueled by this right, which has taken us back decades. It’s as if we had returned to the 1950s, to a system in which to satisfy even the most basic rights of citizens and businesses you need the godfather on duty.” And on the President of the Region: «How can Schifani stay there an extra minute?». Among the examples, the funds against hydrogeological instability: «During the Giallorossi government we had financed extraordinary maintenance and hydrogeological reorganization works in Sicily with one billion. The Region decided to deal with them by appointing an extraordinary commissioner, and that commissioner was arrested for corruption.”
The judgment on the Strait Bridge is also clear: «They are keeping up this fiction exclusively to try again to distribute, as they have done up to now, in an opaque manner, the miserable benefits that derive from the management of power around this project. But there will be nothing. I have always thought that the Bridge was the only idea for the South and for Sicily of those who had no other ideas.” The result, for Provenzano, is a Sicily in which «the only mobility risks becoming that of leaving, because within this region one can no longer move».
For the regional elections, Provenzano instead sees a precise political space: «In Sicily the No votes in the constitutional referendum were one million two hundred thousand, when in 2022 the Democratic Party and the 5 Star Movement together reached seven hundred thousand votes. Schifani was elected with less than nine hundred thousand. There is enormous space for a clear and serious political offer.” The path passes through a minimum program shared by the coalition and the search for a figure on which to converge: «If there is not this possibility, even in Sicily, as at a national level, we would have to go to the primaries. We will all decide who will lead this alternative.” With an invitation to the party: «We must be tenaciously united in this region of ours too. So the game reopens here too.”