"I'm going straight forward and I count on the Stretto di Messina company to provide responses to all the observations made by the other ministries within 30 days: the objective, I repeat, is to start the works by summer 2024. I count on Italy can be a model of development, growth and engineering". This was reiterated by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, speaking at the initiative on public contracts, organized by Confcooperative Lavoro e Servizi, speaking about the Strait Bridge.
Regarding the government's action, the deputy prime minister underlined that "after 18 months we will make a report of the things done and a planning of the things to do, because there are still three and a half years to go and this government has every intention of reaching the end of the legislature without changes in leadership or jersey. And this is already revolutionary."
Oppositions continue to take opposing positions on the Bridge. "We have said a lot about the work, about the many critical issues, about the ways in which the Minister of Infrastructure resurrected a project that had never passed the environmental compatibility test with a series of procedural and legislative forcing, trying to circumvent the regulations in force. A project which is already having a series of very serious impacts on the territory and which does not represent a solution to the serious infrastructural problems of Sicily and Calabria. We represented the critical issues in the document filed by the Democratic Party and they were confirmed in the observations made yesterday were presented by the Via-Vas Commission. Observations somehow endorsed by the government itself, i.e. by the Ministry of the Environment", underlined the leader of the Democratic Party in the Chamber Chiara Braga.
"This is a demonstration - he added - of the fact that our concerns have a basis that not even the arrogance and arrogance of Minister Salvini can overcome. This project is wrong, it is dangerous due to the way it is developed and carried forward and we believe that a firm opposition action must be put in place with all the tools. The Democratic Party joins the battle of the environmentalist associations".
"The 239 requests for integration to the Strait Bridge project are much more than an ideological opposition, as Salvini has always maintained. They are the technical, scientific, environmental awareness that that project needs to be completely reviewed. The project is old, of 2012, 12 years ago: how could anyone think of applying it today without timely checks? Is the attitude of those who want to continue on that path, already spending hundreds of millions of public money, building armchair factories, deluding themselves that development of the South can go through a pharaonic and wrong work. Cicily and Calabria have great infrastructural deficiencies, let's start from there and not from electoral propaganda", remarked the vice-president of the Chamber, Sergio Costa (M5s).