Speech by David Sassoli, President of the European Parliament. Participants: Sabino Cassese, Judge Emeritus of the Constitutional Court and Professor of Global Governance at the School of Government of LUISS Guido Carli; Massimiliano Fedriga, President of the State-Regions Conference, President of Friuli Venezia Giulia Region. Introduced by Andrea Simoncini, Vice President of the Meeting for Friendship amongst Peoples Foundation, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Florence.

The theme is the epochal change we are going through and how it is affecting our republican institutions, in other words, as Giorgio La Pira said, our ‘common home’. This year, partly as a result of the pandemic-related events that we have all experienced and that we are still experiencing, the chosen topic is the “verticalisation of power”, meaning by this expression the increasingly strong and growing tendency to imagine direct and immediate forms of connection between the top level of political action and the people, thus skipping all the intermediate entities and the mediation processes that are increasingly felt as useless or delaying. This debate will be attended by David Sassoli, President of the European Parliament, Massimiliano Fedriga of the State-Regions Conference and Professor Sabino Cassese