Conte’s hearing before the Covid Committee

“With these statements of mine, I assume full legal responsibility for what I am about to say. I have no difficulty in taking an oath using a formula that allows me to state that I accept all the consequences – ‘pleno jure’, as legal experts would say – with regard to the matters of which I am aware. I come here fully aware that I must report, to the best of my knowledge and belief, all the facts known to me. I will take – and have always taken – political responsibility for my conduct and my actions as well.” Thus begins Giuseppe Conte’s speech during his hearing before the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the management of the health emergency caused by Covid and the debate on face masks.

“I have to submit a document that I received in an anonymous letter and which I handed over to the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office on Monday; it was drawn up on 14 April 2022, arrived with the names redacted but all the titles are included, and consists of ten pages,” said Conte before going into the details of his hearing. This document concerns the “delivery of face masks”. The leader of the Five Star Movement emphasised that “there is a possibility that millions from the State have been paid to a private company – an enormous sum for face masks that do not meet the specified and declared specifications”. He added: “Reading this transcript, it would appear that none of the parcels stored in a warehouse in Pomezia are masks with filtering efficacy; the model does not match, and there is a falsified version of the package leaflet.”

“At last, here we are. The Committee has been a firing squad for me.” The meeting with the former Prime Minister comes after months of back-and-forth between the leader of the Five Star Movement and Fratelli d’Italia. The meeting began almost four hours late due to proceedings in the Chamber of Deputies. In order to be heard, Conte resigned as a member of the very same committee that was due to meet on Tuesday 4 August. He said: “The idea has taken hold that I was afraid to speak in this context: I have never been afraid; I have always acted transparently; those who speak in this way do not know me.” He added: “On the subject of fear, I cannot accept lessons from those who are not in a position to give them: just yesterday we saw examples of people who are afraid, who run away, who defend their party colleagues, who do not hand over their chat logs.” The reference was to Delmastro and the chats with Caroccia, but he stopped himself immediately: “This is not the place for that.” He went on to assert: “We have worked in extremely difficult circumstances to try to save the country. Working day and night – and that’s not just a cliché. In 2020, we saved over 330,000 jobs, thanks to the ban on redundancies that we in Italy had the courage to implement.”

“You have excluded the regions from the hearings!” Conte added. He explained: “To give a true picture of what happened, I would in fact have had to involve the regional health authorities: the regions. I am referring to the majority: you have irresponsibly excluded the regions from the scope of this committee’s inquiry. Because the regions bear the legal, substantive, economic and social responsibility for managing healthcare. So we could meet here a hundred times, but you will not allow me to address a fundamental aspect of the pandemic.” And the reason, according to the former prime minister, is to protect local centre-right administrators. “The regions hardest hit were Veneto and Piedmont; how can we proceed without examining in depth what happened at regional level? It is a serious issue of accountability.”

“You can dig as much as you like: you’ll never find anything unlawful on my part, because there simply has never been any unlawful conduct,” Conte went on to say. “I,” he continued, “have carried out my duties with discipline and honour, and I will not allow anyone to cast a shadow over the handling of the pandemic, because these shadows you cast end up extending even to the men and women of the state who fought to safeguard the nation.” And he attacked the majority once more: “Today you set yourselves up as judges,” Conte told the majority. “But where were you during the pandemic?” He added: “Your leader, Meloni, went on television to call me a criminal. The true patriots are those who fought against the pandemic; then there are the fake ones who speculated on a great national and international tragedy. We cannot recall any useful contribution on your part.”

“Despite the controversy, Italy has truly been a model in practice, both nationally and internationally,” Conte went on to say, still referring to the decisions he took during the pandemic. According to the former Prime Minister, “our economy has proved particularly resilient precisely because of the measures taken to contain the spread of the virus and a massive support package for households and businesses.” He added: “It was not a temporary rebound but a capacity for recovery that demonstrated the vitality of the Italian system.” He also highlighted the international support: “They were emulated by Spain, France and Greece, and adopted by the European Union and the WHO as risk-mitigation tools. Every time we issued a Prime Ministerial Decree, embassies would translate it and circulate it to foreign ministries.”

“We have managed to bring about a turning point in Europe with the NRRP,” Conte went on to claim. “It’s not just me saying this,” he clarified, “but experts in European law and economics. It was a turning point in European history on a par with the Maastricht Treaty because it introduced an action plan based on solidarity, but it happened in the context of shared public debt.” And on the use of Prime Ministerial Decrees (DPCMs): “During the pandemic, it was never considered to exercise the state’s substitute powers as a matter of political choice; rather, there was constant dialogue with regional authorities – a dialogue it would have been good to hear here too.”

And on the use of Prime Ministerial Decrees: “Our Constitution does not contain explicit provisions governing a state of emergency, unlike other constitutions such as those of Germany, Spain or France. One of the most sensitive issues we faced was deciding what kind of measures to implement, in the knowledge that such a severe pandemic risked significantly altering the balance between the various branches of government, putting the very stability of our democratic system to the test.”

And he asks the commissioners: “Do you think I hadn’t realised that? There has been extensive debate on this.” He explains: “We had to chart a course for the executive that would allow it to adopt all appropriate containment measures to deal with the sudden evolution of the epidemiological situation, whilst constantly involving Parliament. I, in agreement with all the ministers, have never considered the possibility of exercising the state’s power of substitution; this was a conscious political choice, not merely a practical one.”