Hello,

It is a real pleasure to meet each other I believe, but it is even more my pleasure to meet for real some of my virtual friends.

You are part of the large community of Facebook and Twitter, and today we are here together because you have been selected on the basis of a game to determine the “photo of the year”.

But, this is more than this and it is actually only the excuse to extend my sincere thanks to the hundreds and thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter who keep commenting, encouraging, criticizing, insulting, thus creating a tremendous opportunity of communication in order to share together challenges, problems, concerns, achievements and flaws, and to keep charged me and all public representatives who are part of this great community and continuously share with their followers statuses, comments, photos, videos, selfies and video selfies.

This is a special occasion to say a few things. First of all, to tell all those who harass me from time to time saying “you’re spending your time on Facebook”, “dude, you have nothing better to do?”, “we didn’t vote you to post statuses”, “we didn’t vote you to see your photos”, and so on, that this is a tremendous opportunity that takes very little time, almost nothing, and which enables a direct information on real time and without intermediaries. Of course, the information needs also to go through intermediaries, which are the media, the journalists, the analysts, and this reduces tremendously the financial costs because every communication through the media costs money, to the media themselves, but also to us. So, this is a tool, a means, an irreplaceable network and thanks to you it has become something that cannot be compared to anything else if we consider how deeply the communication goes and how it is shared.

I am honestly thankful for all those who are active, whether they are sympathetic or not, whether they convey encouraging messages or they criticize. Of course, I am sorry for those who use a low language but which is part of the freedom guaranteed by the network, and somehow this is better than having a censored network. I believe you know that expression, which is a standard of the freedom of speech and which goes: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” This means that freedom of speech is not negotiable and it is inalienable, even in the name of the necessary ethics that needs to be preserved, or should be promoted through the promotion of ideas, or through the promotion of criticism.

This network would be useless, at least as far as I am concerned, as far as those who deal with politics are concerned, hadn’t it have its critical dimension, although someone called it, not wrongly, the industry of anger and resentment due to the comments put in networks. But this is part of the opportunity to better understand the public, to thoroughly understand their feelings that, even when not expressed in a quite unethical way, they do convey a message, they do convey a state which a person of politics has absolutely an obligation to feel. In my point of view, another good aspect of the network is that it helps to get a lot of information on the psychological and emotional condition of the interlocutors and of those who comment.

In addition, I believe that all of you deserve a thank you for your encouragement because encouragement is necessary. It generates positive energy which helps you to not step back in front of the challenges encountered on a road that must be crossed thoroughly, with determination and without being affected by the natural oscillations of opinion when it comes to reforms that concern a status quo, a state of comfort, regardless of the fact that this comfort or status quo come from a low quality of life.

In order to increase the quality of life, we have to accept sacrifices. In order to run faster, we need to accept the workout fatigue. In order to heal a disease, we have to accept therapies that are very unpleasant, we have to accept the bitter medicines, and we need to accept living with the consequences of these therapies for a certain time but, there is no doubt, being aware that all this is necessary for us to move to a new quality of life.

I won’t dwell on this, I promise. I don’t know their names, I don’t know where they come from, but I’m calling them my friends in suffering, here in your presence.

***

Today, on the last day of the year Prime Minister Rama received at the central hall of the Prime Minister’s Office some friends of social networks, young men and women, pupils and students, active citizens who communicate every day with the Prime Minister through their comments and opinions on FB and Twitter.

The young welcomed this initiative of the Prime Minister and were happy to have a direct meeting with him and to be able to extend him their wishes on the New Year.

The Prime Minister invited them to express freely and without fear their opinions, as they do every day on social networks.

“I wanted to say that the idea the Prime Minister had to have his fans in the Prime Minister’s Office is a terrific idea. I like the fact that he is trying to keep in touch with the virtual world, and some other minor details, for instance the fact that he updates by himself his FB page, or the fact that he does not delete the comments but leaves them all, even the negative comments” – one of them said.

Considering this meeting as an opportunity to promote citizen values, not only virtually but also in a direct way, a student said: “As a students’ representative, I would like to thank you for the chances you have given them to promote and show their values. I would say to all young people who are here to use FB and all social networks as an opportunity to look at all political points of view in order to become better critics.”

After the meeting with young people, the Prime Minister invited them to take together a video selfie in memory of New Year’s Eve.