Good morning everyone. 
Thank you for being here, thanks to President Bonaccini. 

I might as well not even do this speech, President Bonaccini - we’ve both been involved in politics long enough to know what will be the most talked about thing regarding this morning. Joking aside, what I want to say is that I agree with the things you said, and I also agree that it can sometimes be regrettable for those who spend a lot of time working on serious and difficult things that the results of that work do not always get the visibility and attention they deserve. I say that in order to take a step back and look at the work we’ve done to get to where we are today, to the signing of this Cohesion Agreement.

I of course wish to thank the President of the Region for this, but I must also thank institutions at all levels, the Mayors, Presidents of the Provinces and members of the Government, because this has been, and is, a matter of teamwork, involving all institutional levels and delivering concrete results to the citizens of all Italian regions.

Unless I am mistaken, Emilia-Romagna is the seventh Region to sign a Cohesion Agreement with the Government, but we will come to all of Italy’s Regions. Emilia-Romagna is the first region to do so in 2024, but this process concerns all Italian citizens and is the result of long and complex work by the Government involving the prior reorganisation of development and cohesion funds, for which I must above all thank Minister Fitto. As President Bonaccini mentioned, the Development and Cohesion Fund is an instrument provided for by the European Treaties and is the main one for combatting territorial inequality. In addition to these EU structural resources, there is national co-funding that is organised on the basis of multiannual cycles. 
This is an extremely important instrument because territorial inequality is obviously not just about the north-south divide, but is also about the divides that exist in Italy, for example, between Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic coast, within individual Regions, between inner areas and metropolitan cities, and so it’s about bringing all this work together. 

What was the problem? It was not about the Emilia Romagna Region, but rather Italy as a whole. The problem was that, all too often, there were delays in spending these resources, especially with regard to the national share of the Fund; in some cases, these delays prevented the resources from being spent. 
Yes, we have the problem that resources are lacking, but in Italy we also had another problem and that was that, sometimes, the resources were there but it was nevertheless not possible to spend them. We have therefore worked to piece together what happened especially during the previous 2014-2020 programming period, and to initiate the new programming period, so 2021-2027; this work has involved all institutional levels, allowing us on the one hand to understand what could be done to optimise the resources and put in order the work that hadn’t been done perfectly in the past, and to plan work together for the new programming cycle, collaborating with the Regions in particular, but also involving the other institutional levels too.  

As a result of this long and complex work, we passed the ‘decreto Sud‘ [‘decree for the South’], which reorganises the Cohesion Fund, putting in place these Cohesion Agreements.

These Cohesion Agreements between the national Government and the Regions have what I believe to be important new features, the first of which regards the fact that the resources are distributed to regional authorities in order to achieve goals that are proposed by the Regions themselves, but that are also agreed with the national Government. This is obviously not because we want to limit regional authorities’ autonomy but is rather to ensure that the work carried out by the Regions forms part of a bigger strategy, to ensure that we are not working randomly, that we do not think of ourselves as separate nations in which everyone acts according to their own priorities; we are trying to do the same thing we have done overall for all funds, and EU funds in particular.

We must take another step back here and look at the issue of the NRRP. When I chose to combine responsibility for the NRRP with responsibility for the Development and Cohesion Fund, placing both in Minister Fitto’s capable hands, I did so for this very reason, in other words to ensure that, overall, these resources had a single strategy, that one Fund could be used to cover a shortcoming of another, both at regional level but also with regard to priorities, with everything ultimately forming part of the same reasoning. This work is also now paying off with regard to the NRRP, and this is also important to remember.

I remember all the warnings about use of the NRRP, about delays, some of which were also deliberately polemical; the reality tells a very different story, and that is that, despite attempts to say that Italy, the Italian Government, would have huge problems with the NRRP, in 2023: we received payment of the third instalment, solving the problems that were there; we were the first nation in Europe to receive payment of the fourth instalment; we delivered the milestones and targets already for the fifth instalment and requested payment for the fifth instalment, again being the first nation in Europe to do so. While we were doing this, we also renegotiated the NRRP (which was something else that was said would be impossible to achieve) because the Plan had clearly been drawn up prior to the situation in which we find ourselves today, and it therefore needed to be updated. That work to revise the NRRP, including also the REPowerEU chapter, has allowed us, on the one hand, to solve the problems we would otherwise have come up against with the measures that were contained in the previous Plan, and, on the other, to free up very significant resources.

President Bonaccini, you spoke about competitiveness, investments in growth, and this is indeed the case: by doing this work, we have managed, for example, to free up a total of EUR 21 billion which we have reprogrammed, with over EUR 12 billion going entirely to our productive fabric. I know this is a very sensitive issue for people here.

There are more than EUR 6 billion for transition 6.0, there are resources to improve the energy efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises, there are resources for agri-food supply chains, for agrivoltaics, there are additional resources for healthcare. Looking further, there are another EUR 1.2 billion to go towards reconstruction work in Emilia Romagna, in the flood-hit areas, which are in addition to the work the Government is already doing, and we will be coming back to this later today. I shall now also go back to the Cohesion Fund. This is to say that this work has been carried out silently - it is difficult to go into and isn’t mentioned much in the news day to day, but I am particularly proud of it – in order to overcome a number of limits that Italy has had until now.

My goal, our goal, is to transform Italy from being a nation often considered as trailing behind in the use of EU funds especially, to a nation that can become an example in using EU funds. We can only do this by working together.
The Development and Cohesion Fund: there are another two important things introduced by these Cohesion Agreements, which I am pleased to tell you about by way of an introduction to the presentation of this agreement. One is the possibility to withdraw funding if resources are not spent, because wasting resources cannot be tolerated. So, if it is not possible to achieve a goal, then financing for that goal can be reorganised, with resources going to another objective. Then, substitute powers can also be used should there be any delays. This is hardly a problem that will be encountered here, but it is a problem that has arisen and so we wanted to tackle it in a comprehensive manner.

So, here we are today, at the signing of the Cohesion Agreement with Emilia Romagna. The President [of the Region] has already said a lot. We are making EUR 588 million available, 121 of which, unless I am mistaken, were already allocated as a prepayment in 2021. If we add the co-financing amount to these resources, total funds reach EUR 687 million, which are being mobilised today with the signing of this agreement. 
We are focusing on a total of 92 projects, with a few major priorities.

President Bonaccini explained this well: resources are not being spent on hundreds of microprojects through small investments, but rather priorities are being chosen that represent a driving force, those that most boost the ability to create growth and the ability to provide a Region that has historically had an extraordinary ability to perform so well with tools that will allow it to progress even faster.

We of course had to deal with the flooding that affected this area, which we will also be talking about later today in Forlì where the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will be returning after her visit to these lands with myself and Stefano Bonaccini just a few days after the flooding, when she took on responsibilities and commitments also from a European point of view: to provide responses.

Those responses have arrived, in particular precisely with this revision of our National Recovery and Resilience Plan which, as I said, allows us to invest EUR 1.2 billion, in particular on flood protection and on restoring the road network and road infrastructure, restoring public housing, restoring public health and social care facilities, and restoring schools and sports infrastructure.

Going back to the Cohesion Agreement, the Region proposed, and the Government agreed, to allocate one of the largest sums of this Agreement (approximately EUR 137 million) to measures to ensure the safety of road infrastructure. Our goal is to work above all on prevention and maintenance, and action to be taken will be based on an annual survey into the provinces’ needs, so that we can always work based on priorities, starting with the most urgent situations. These resources are in addition to the funds the Region had already earmarked for the road system and transport as part of the prepayment I mentioned in 2021.

Also in this regard, EUR 27 million have been allocated for 21 extraordinary maintenance projects for water engineering works in the Region’s hydrographic basins, but, as President Bonaccini was saying, there is clearly also much more.

EUR 95 million have been earmarked for urban regeneration, with a particular focus on inner areas and mountainous areas, precisely because, as we were saying, cohesion funds are funds that concentrate on the need to fight territorial inequality and disparity. 

There are EUR 47 million, 20 of which regarding the new programming period, for the expansion and enhancement of Bologna’s intermodal freight terminal. This intermodal infrastructure plays a key role for this region, which is home to so many companies and so many products, not to mention the skills and expertise to produce extraordinary things. We sometimes have to provide a helping hand to allow progress to be made quicker, to allow for competition on a level playing field, especially also with systems outside our national borders that receive support from national governments and manage to receive responses that don’t always arrive here in Italy.

We are doing important work on the right to education and training and on promoting Made in Italy products and services. For some of these projects, the things go together.

There are EUR 14 million for university buildings, but I would also like to mention the EUR 35 million to build the ‘Motor Valley College’ in Maranello, near to the Ferrari workshops: this will allow for the development of training courses in the automotive industry, in collaboration also with Ferrari’s ‘School of Trades and Professions’. This is once again about combining tradition, Made in Italy excellence, training and modernity, and this can be done with this project which I consider to be very interesting and very important.

There are EUR 20 million for new research facilities at the San Lazzaro campus in Reggio Emilia, so the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and a last thing that deserves to be mentioned: EUR 18 million dedicated to upgrading the Region’s sports facilities – also on this, I join in the congratulations and encouragement for all our athletes.

As I was saying, these are important resources focusing on a limited number of strategic goals that are about development, growth, infrastructure and the future, and so I am very proud of this work as indeed I am very proud of the work we will be presenting later today, which is more specifically about the NRRP. I must of course thank the entire Government, but I must also thank the President of the Region, the regional authorities, the local councillors involved, the Mayors, the Presidents of the Provinces and all offices that have worked on this, because I know it’s a very difficult job, I know this work is complex, but I also know that, together, we have done an excellent job, and this is the case for this Cohesion Agreement as indeed it is and can be the case for all the other major challenges we are facing because - as President Bonaccini said and I completely agree with him - at the end of the day, it seems to me that we are all aware of the fact that we all have our own points of view, we all have our own unique characteristics and perspectives, but if there is one thing that should theoretically bring us together it is that we do not work for ourselves but for the citizens we represent.

Thank you all, and I wish you all the best with your work.

[Courtesy translation]