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Inquiry Qatar-European Parliament
A network of left-wing MPs taking money from Qatar and Morocco speaking well of one regime that disregards human rights and making trade deals with another that oppresses minorities, resulting in suitcases full of cash and NGOs like Fight Impunity, with names brimming with progressivism and used as boxes be used to embezzle Chinese illegal loans. All this in the heart of this European Union, beacon of internationalism, of freedom of thought, that today we discover as Tortuga, populated by unscrupulous businessmen, completely naked and helpless in the face of their temptations.
You can sidestep it for as long as you like, hiding behind all the walls of caution, guarantees, and presumption of innocence, pretending we’re talking about it four villains like Eva Kaili or Antonio Panzeri, or rotten apples around which everything is pure and pure. You can, but you know very well that it is not so. And just a conversation with some current or former MEPs is enough to put in the basket a complete collection of “we knew”, “they are not the only ones”, “così fan tutti”. Enough to state with reasonable certainty that what has been collected by Qatargate or Moroccogate is nothing more than part of a systemic, multi-faceted, transversal underworld.
Sure, every story has its culprits who are guiltier than the others. Is this this time making noise the falling tree in the forest on the left is at least physiological. For the unbearable stench of double standards that the story exudes. Because whoever took the money from Qatar and Morocco belonged to those forces that should theoretically have been on the side of the smallest, the workers, the marginalized, the persecuted, the renewables. Because those same political forces, without a shred of shame, hidden by an incredible presumption of impunity, pointed the finger at the right-wing sovereigns suspected of having links with Russia Wladimir Putin. Or they asked Hungary Victor Orban did not receive Pnrr funds due to the corruption of its political apparatus.
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This double standard and the rhetoric that goes with it is more outrageous than suitcases full of money. But even more embarrassing is the silence of those for years – decades? He pretended not to see what was happening. For example, that many decisions about our lives in Brussels and Strasbourg have been made – many laws that national parliaments simply have to ratify are the result of Community directives – without there having been and there are no democratic processes worthy of this responsibility. That the degree of democracy and representativeness of the community is also inversely proportional to the abnormal number of lobbyists and political interest groups who set up tents around the palaces of power with the 12-star flag.
If that means throwing the baby out with the bath water and leaving Europe as it is, we owe it not to our outrage or our summary sense of justice, but to the disaster wreaked by those tasked with defending this political experiment. In other words: today, sovereigns and nationalists from across the continent find themselves walking through the rubble of the European Union and the parties of the socialist and democratic left without wasting a cartridge.
To say today that the European Union needs more democracy, more effective control mechanisms and a return to the values of Altero Spinelli, Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, Altero Spinelli, Jacques Delors and so on and so on in the pantheon is out of time and requires less as zero. Because these are things that were needed years and decades ago when we carried on like nothing happened and pretended we didn’t see what’s fishy. Especially because this affair – even if it only stops at Kaili and Panzeri, it will in all likelihood be the paved road on which the right will march to power in a few yearsand nations will regain their lost sovereignty, and competition between countries will once again triumph over international cooperation.
How much damage this can do to an old continent wedged between superpowers, in the midst of a climate emergency and an epochal technological shift, with war upon us and new waves of pandemics on the horizon, we will tell years from now. Today it is only important to note that Whatever the alternative, we didn’t deserve it enough. And that affects us.
Francesco Cancellato is director of the online journal Fanpage.it. From December 2014 to September 2019 he was director of the online newspaper Linkiesta.it. He is the author of Factor G. Why the Germans are Right (UBE, 2016), Neither Exploited nor Big Boys. Solving the generational question to save Italy” (Egea, 2018) and “Il Muro. 15 stories from the end of the Cold War” (Egea, 2019)