There motion of no confidence presented by the center-right against the governor Michele Emiliano was rejected: 18 votes in favour, 31 against (two councilors absent). The M5s and Action groups also voted against the motion.
The political fact is that the centre-left majority in Puglia has found unity again after the shocks caused by the investigations and arrests in the context of three different investigations by the Bari Prosecutor's Office. After the resignation, the exit of the M5s from the government, the controversies, the clash between the Nazarene and the governor Michele Emiliano and the mini reshuffle, the majority in the Regional Council voted unitedly against the motion of no confidence presented by the centre-right. Support for the President of the Region also came from M5s and Action, probably convinced by the governor's speech which arrived almost at the end of six hours of discussion and discussion in the chamber. Emiliano's words certainly healed the stomach aches of several regional councilors and put aside the frictions that had emerged in recent weeks.
“I ask you to reject the motion of no confidence, because I honestly don't deserve to be voted out of confidence. I tell you this from the bottom of my heart. I will have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but not to the point of being disheartened at a time when, in twenty years of very hard work, we have truly changed the history of this Region”, was Emiliano's heartfelt appeal. The governor carried out a delicate mending operation in his very varied coalition: managing to bring together M5s, Action, Pd, and civic groups was not an easy task. Of course, not all the problems have been overcome and in the coming weeks we will need to understand how relations will evolve. On the other hand, it was the regional commissioner of Action himself, Fabiano Amati, who warned Emiliano:
“If his answers do not convince us or, worse, do not materialize, it is very simple: after May 7th there is May 8th, then the 9th, then the 10th, then the 15th. We too can present the motion of no confidence”, he underlined. The governor, for his part, reiterated two concepts: “The investigations do not concern the political activity of the Region”; and “We will strengthen the safeguards of legality” as requested by the M5s. Politically, however, the objective is to achieve what they “fail to do in Rome: to build a broad, broad, that brings together all the progressive forces in our country, to prepare the future of this country”https://gazzettadelsud.it/articoli/politica/2024/05/07/respinta-la-sfiducia-a-emiliano-centrosinistra-compatto-il-govatore-costruiamo-un-fronte- largo-1c85b598-c64d-4e25-847c-658c7808786a/.”It's something – Emiliano assured – that we try to do in the political laboratory of the Puglia Region”.
“In this last month we have gone through a political and media storm of enormous proportions”, but “there isn't even one investigation into the Puglia Region, not even one. There is no challenge to the trials you are hearing about that concerns the Puglia Region”. The president of the Puglia Region, Michele Emiliano, said this during the discussion of the motion of no confidence in the Puglia Regional Council. “Of course – he added – there are certainly preliminary investigations underway, which concern managers, other subjects, but nothing that concerns the political level, who indeed, on several occasions, was the protagonist of the complaint, because the multimillion-dollar scam, unfortunately, of those professionals, of those lawyers, who in collusion with some employees of the Region carried out scams, taking advantage of the injunctive decrees in agriculture, the 'We discovered it, I have to be honest, me and the head of the legal profession. We recently noticed that there were some employees who believed they were repaying a lawyer's fee that they had already paid. We will try to establish how and under what terms; and we noticed it. We removed him and recovered the sums”https://gazzettadelsud.it/articoli/politica/2024/05/07/respinta-la-sfiducia-a-emiliano-centrosinistra-compatto-il-govatore-costruiamo-un- forehead-largo-1c85b598-c64d-4e25-847c-658c7808786a/.”Even the last investigation mentioned in the news started from the engineer Valenzano, who obviously reported it: he realized – Emiliano recalled – that there was a guarantee that was probably not true. So important work has been done, within the limits of our possibilities, because we do not have investigative means, and I must say that we probably do not even have investigative power, in the sense that we have supervisory power, which is something very different from to investigate”.
“We want to strengthen internal legality controls. We have already enormously strengthened the regional health inspection unit, which acts as a real control body. I heard, from Marco Galante's speech, that it is the intention of the 5 Star Movement to extend the method that we have developed with the Nirs to the rest of the administration, and it is a point that I agree with. It is a point that I agree with, even if it were just a matter of reviewing, as we do in healthcare, the procedures and verifying that they are all well done. It was announced to me that the 5 Star Movement group is about to present a bill, this bill will be supported by the regional government” said Emiliano.