Schlein: "Let's not criminalize the squares, many young people are protesting peacefully"

Speaking to the Democratic Party's grassroots gathering in Montepulciano, at the close of the three-day event in the Sienese town, PD secretary Elly Schlein opens with a tribute to the audience before her: "Thank you for helping me broaden unity within the party and the coalition. It's not easy, but it always pays off in terms of consensus." The leader's speech focuses on the protests of recent days, seeking to reverse the right's narrative: "Even yesterday, many, many young people took to the streets peacefully to ask to have a part in building the future. And they are not just our future, they are our present." "When the new generations take to the streets, it is good news for democracy, and we will not accept the attempt to criminalize this generation." "We must," the leader continues, "manage to listen to that demand and make it our own. In some cases there are clashes, even serious ones, but there are no lootings, no generalized guerrilla warfare that some feared or even hoped to see." For the PD secretary, "it is unacceptable that the violent are used to silence the voice of students, farmers, and workers." At the end of her speech, Schlein spoke about the coalition: "It is up to us to answer this call, doing so together with our allies, stubbornly united. We will do it quickly, because we are not starting from zero. Most of the proposals are already the fruit of joint work in Parliament and in the territories. Now there is the last important mile. We will face this challenge together. Together we can beat the right and write a fairer future. Let's go win, thank you, long live the PD and antifascist Italy." The PD's balance sheet "With the 2x1000 options registered as of September 30 of this year, added to the October choices which we imagine will be at least equivalent to those of last year, we have calculated that we will reach a new record for the 2x1000, surpassing the ceiling of 11,000,000 euros." So said Michele Fina, PD treasurer, in Montepulciano during the three days of debates among the areas of the Democratic majority. "We succeeded thanks to the choice of putting the territories at the center, transferring to them a share of the resources and collaborating with them. In fact, if in the eight years from 2015 to 2022 about one million was transferred to the territories, in the four years from 2023 to 2027 we will have transferred over 7,000,000 euros to them," he adds.