Nicola Procaccini (Rome, 1976) is a MEP of the Brothers of Italy and co-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists group of the European Parliament. This week, he charged against Pedro Sanchez on several occasions. “Spain is the largest financier of Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine” and “has just surpassed Hungary as a gas importer,” he argued. The Spanish president has become a phenomenon for the Italian opposition, and now seems to be in the political crosshairs of Giorgia Meloni and his party.
Procaccini speaks with EL PERIÓDICO and the newspaper El Confidencial about this and other current affairs during a recess in the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Hoy [por el miércoles] The EU measures against the crisis that seems to be looming due to the war against Iran have been debated here in Strasbourg. Does Europe have a plan?
The European Union is being too weak. The usual narrative is repeated, disconnected from reality, especially on the energy issue: we have to produce energy ourselves, not just buy energy from outside. Renewables are obviously an important way to produce energy. But solar or wind energy is too unstable and we don’t have the necessary supply chain, especially for batteries. They must be only one piece of the puzzle: we need renewables, but also fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Is the problem depending on outsiders?
I think what Pedro Sánchez is doing is a mistake, buying liquefied gas from Russia. You know what I said at the press conference. Now, a quarter of all the liquefied gas that reaches Europe is purchased by Spain. At the same time, at the last European Council in Cyprus, we gave Ukraine 90 billion euros to defend itself from the Russian invasion. It doesn’t make sense.
What is your position on the attack on Iran?
We don’t share it. We were not even informed beforehand. But now that it has occurred, we hope that the United States and Israel will achieve their objectives: eliminating Iran’s missile capabilities, the nuclear program and, if possible, regime change. We do not want the United States and Israel to be humiliated or defeated and for the ayatollahs to be strengthened.
Do you think they are being humiliated, as Friedrich Merz has said?
No, but some on the left are waiting for it.
What do you think about Israel’s actions in Gaza?
We believe that Trump did a masterpiece there, because he managed to stop the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians and at the same time return Israelis to Israel.
What do your Brothers of Italy party think about Trump?
Giorgia Meloni has a balanced approach. When Trump is wrong, he tells you so. She says, “I’m not a cheerleader, I don’t go around with pom poms cheering for Trump or anyone.” But he adds: I am stubbornly Western and, therefore, stubbornly an ally of the United States of America, regardless of who is president at any given time, because Italian interest coincides with American interest. Obviously not always, not totally, but certainly more than with Russia, Iran, North Korea or China. That is what I said today in plenary: you have to choose, either you are with the Western democracies, although sometimes you do not agree with them, or you are with Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. And we know which side we are on.
Nicola Procaccini Italian MEP and President of the European Conservatives and Reformists / .
Sánchez has become a model for the Italian left. At the same time, Meloni is for part of the Spanish right. Do you think this situation is creating a kind of division between Spain and Italy?
Honestly, not from our side. In Cyprus there was an initiative by the governments of Spain and Italy regarding the fallen profits of energy companies. And we are on the same side regarding stability [financiera]. The Italian left sees Pedro Sánchez as a kind of myth. But I could give another example that we are not that far away: the Italy-Albania protocol to create a regional immigrant center in Albania. There was a big battle against this protocol, even though Albania’s president, Edi Rama, is a social democrat, and Albania is a candidate to join the European Union. At the same time, Sánchez is doing exactly the same thing with Mauritania, where the president is a military general, and the human rights situation in Mauritania is absolutely worse than in Albania.
Sánchez has just approved a regularization of more than half a million immigrants. What is your opinion?
I don’t think it is a problem only for Spain, but also for Europe. If you give these irregular migrants the license to be European, it means they can go anywhere in Europe, not just stay in Spain. This is not how the phenomenon of migration is governed.
Is regularizing losing control?
For the Italian Government, migration is not bad, but the phenomenon must be governed. To do this, you must be very tough against illegal migration, so that you can select legal migrants to achieve the best integration into our societies, the best development. It is reasonable to bring in people from outside to do jobs that insiders don’t want to do.
But Spanish companies, represented by the employers’ association, are in favor of this regularization, because it is good for the economy.
Yes, but now we have to be careful because workers’ rights may come under pressure, they may be suspended. If you have a mass of workers at the doors pushing to enter, that means that not only the salaries, but also the rights of the workers who are already inside are going down, down, down.
But those workers are already there, and they are already being paid less because they are illegal. When they become legal, then you have to pay them more, like the minimum wage.
But the minimum wage is the minimum. It is not the best, it is not the free market. In the free market you have supply and demand, and the intersection between the two defines the salary level. If you force supply, even if there is a minimum, it means that those with higher salaries are also pushed towards the minimum level.
The ECR group here in Europe sometimes votes with the Patriots [el grupo de Vox y Agrupación Nacional de Francia]sometimes with the European People’s Party…
We have a very long political tradition. The ECR group was founded by the tories British. That imprint is still there. So if you look at the ECR, you have to look at Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, the Western right. What does it mean? Liberal in the economy, very focused on competitiveness, but at the same time strong in defending the founding values of Western civilization.
Do you believe in the European Union?
We believe in Europe. Our mantra is to do less, but do it better. We should be together to do few things, not everything. We do not want a superstate that reduces countries to administrative bodies, such as municipalities, without powers, because all powers remain under the European Union. And this is exactly Margaret Thatcher’s idea: a confederal union, not a federal one.
What is your position on the common European defense?
There are differences between the different rights. If I speak as an Italian right, we have always been in favor of a common European defense, since the 70s, as a European pillar of NATO, allied with the United States. The French right is more or less in the same position. Others, like the Poles, do not want a common army, due to their history more closely linked to the US Army.
On what other issues is the EU important?
There are some areas where it is important for Europe to act: foreign policy, energy supply… where together we are stronger and can have cheaper energy. Or the single market, perhaps the main asset of the European Union. It means a market of 500 million people exchanging goods and moving around. But we do not want a European Union that imposes everything on us: how we cook, how we dress, how we move. That is not the founding idea.
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