For 89% of a sample of Italians, bribes and abuses of power are a widespread problem. 43% believe them to have increased in the last year. A perception, described in the 2022 statistics of the EU Commission, which is added to the emergencies reported in the report on the rule of law in Europe, including the limited access to information on party financing in our country.
Yet all this is not reflected in the electoral programs: the “fight against corruption” chapter is sparse if not absent at all. A detail that has not escaped, for example, the advisory board of Transparency International Italy, ready to press for an integration of the political agenda in the fight against crime and which has drawn up seven proposals.
The open files
The themes at stake are many. There is the adaptation of the whistleblowing legislation to the European directives and the lobbying law stalled in the Senate with the fall of the Draghi government. But also the strengthening of the Anac and the discipline of the abuse of office, the trafficking of influences and corruption between private individuals, up to the administrative simplification, the promotion of best practices in the public administration and an update of the legislative decree 231/2001 on organizational models and the law 190/2012 on transparency in the Public Administration
Furthermore, the problem is not only the high perception of the diffusion of the corruption phenomenon, partly the result of the demagogic or populist approach of recent years. Bribes are a matter for the whole of Europe. The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said last Wednesday: “If we want to be credible when we ask the candidate countries to strengthen their democracies, we must also eliminate corruption within the Union”. For this reason – she announced – “next year the Commission will present measures to update our legislative framework for the fight against corruption”.
In Italy the phenomenon is still alarming. Suffice it to consider that between 2014 and 2021 only the Guardia di Finanza reported 25,725 people for this type of crime, of which 2,269 ended up under arrest. The capital under investigation and then seized amounted to just under one billion euros, that is 954.2 million. To this must be added the reports of the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) of the Bank of Italy, on the risk that forms of criminal infiltration and corruption are hidden behind Pnrr contracts.