Rome, 3 July 1990. Statement by Peppino Calderisi, president of the European Federalist Group of the Italian Parliament: "For the first time, the European radicals and federalists who have always shared the government's European policy orientations (even when parties that are part of the government abstained on the European Monetary System), have decided they would not vote on the majority document, because of its backwardness and ambiguity as regards the orientations repeatedly expressed by the Parliament and by the Italian electors through the referendum for the attribution of a constituent mandate to the European Parliament (...)

The parliamentary debate and the majority resolution have not, therefore, canceled, but on the contrary confirmed the concerns of the federalists, especially as regards the positions of Foreign minister De Michelis, who repeatedly expressed contemptuous judgements on the Spinelli project, that is, the project of a Treaty of the European Union, and its allegedly being obsolete.

As if the major events in the countries of Eastern Europe had not strengthened the need to offer a strong federalist guiding point to counteract the resumption of nationalist feelings, and as if the German unification did not impose, first of all, the achievement of the European Union in a short lapse of time, and not simply as a possible perspective.

The gravity of the government's position relies especially in the fact that the referendum result has been disregarded, along with the need for the European Union to be achieved on the basis of a global Constitution project. In this sense we consider the very scarce relevance given to the proposals passed with a vast majority by the institutional Commission of the European Parliament, among which the Colombo relation updating the Spinelli project, incomprehensible.

The pattern which the government (and especially De Michelis) increasingly seem to want to follow is the inter-governmental one, to the detriment of the European Parliament and of the E.C. Commission. An orientation which tends not to solve, but to stress the democratic deficit of the Community institutions."