Everything seems ready to face the next electoral competition, this time of European importance. Beyond the controversies (if they can be defined as such) over the candidatures, which lately seem to have catalysed the attention of the "media" and voters, it would be important to identify, at least for Sardinia, not only its own autonomous political representation with respect to the other Italian insular realities, its territorial and socio-economic reality being peculiar, but also a sort of "Programmatic Intervention Design" useful for bringing to a solution the disadvantaged situation that the Island, so far from the even Italian peninsular context, would seem continue to suffer. It has been said for years, yet even today a proverbial keystone does not seem to have been found.

The territorial discontinuity with peninsular Italy on the one hand, and with the remaining part of the European continent on the other, as well as the aforementioned isolation of the internal areas, would seem to pose as elements of fracture with respect to that fundamental "principle of cohesion" which it would seem to constitute the key principle of the entire national and European legal-administrative system. Such a gap, which has become (it would seem) structural in its connotations and consequences, still currently seems to impose itself on general attention in all its urgency and yet, nevertheless, it would seem to continue to recur as such, that is, as a limit, with all the its unfavorable connotations. At this juncture, what should probably be reviewed in its essential programmatic lines is the so-called European integration process itself, or rather its operational mechanism, which, probably, despite the existence of the so-called cohesion funds, the so-called of regional development, and of the various assistance programs to be provided to regions in conditions of underdevelopment, does not appear to have had the desired effect with reference to the "perimeterization" of the gap between Sardinia and the remaining Italian and European regions.

Furthermore, lastly, no later than the past year, Sardinia had presented a national law proposal for the constitution of the "Sardinian constituency" for the European Parliament elections. Meanwhile, because the autonomous "Constituency" (let's say), would allow for certainty to be achieved in the election of one's own European parliamentarians, which is not always guaranteed when it comes to competing with the Sicilian representations. Therefore, because only by doing so could the combination of representation/representativeness in the European context be truly achieved. Furthermore, because, as has been constantly complained about by many, the structuring of a shared constituency for the larger islands does not appear to be absolutely suitable for guaranteeing Sardinia the ability to count on its own local representatives within the European Parliament. Finally, because the circumstance, evidently determined by the demographic percentage gap existing between the two island realities, has most of the time prevented Sardinia from having its own representatives in Europe.

The times marking the next electoral competitions are very tight, and even today the Constituency, despite the initiatives undertaken, still presents itself as unique and shared for Sicily and Sardinia. New elections, old problems, therefore, all inherent to the growing difficulties of the island territories largely due to the territorial discontinuity with respect to the vast European continent. Sardinia, perhaps today more than yesterday, would need to see an impressive public intervention guaranteed and assured, even in terms of state aid, since, on the one hand, it is necessary to cover the disparities that still exist in terms of development levels in the Italian and European regional context, and on the other hand, fundamental to the achievement of the objectives of economic and social territorial cohesion enshrined in the Treaty.

Giuseppina Di Salvatore – lawyer, Nuoro

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