“It’s not money taken away from healthcare or schools, if we didn’t spend it on defense we wouldn’t be able to spend it on anything else.” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni defends the resources allocated to military spending in communications to the Senate ahead of the European Council and rejects criticism from the opposition.
Funds not taken from welfare
“We have chosen not to use all the margin of additional resources”, underlines the prime minister, contesting the reading according to which defense appropriations would take funds away from welfare. “Whoever says that more security means fewer hospitals and resources taken away” from welfare “by a war-mongering government is lying knowing they do so,” he states. Meloni claims that his is not “a government of warmongers” and recalls the decisions taken by those who are now in opposition: “The same people who accuse us today from the opposition, when they were in government, approved, in the midst of the pandemic, an increase in military spending of around 15 billion euros. And then there wasn’t even a war in Ukraine.”