On the day in which Istat certifies inflation soaring to +4.2% on an annual basis (from +3.3% in August), Giorgia Meloni takes pen and paper again and writes to Ursula von der Leyen. Objective: to put on the table at Ecofin next week in Luxembourg (and then discuss it at the European Council in mid-October) the recognition of member states of "additional flexibility to support families and businesses, in the face of inflationary growth due to high energy prices at a global level".
The issue is not new, because the Italian Government has already raised it at the Ecofin headquarters, as the Prime Minister recalls in a video link with the annual event of the newspaper Il Gazzettino, claiming that effective shared interventions against the increase in energy prices have long been invoked. "For Europe there are no emergency conditions, instead for us it should evaluate the adoption of extraordinary measures", Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said at the release of Ecofin at the beginning of March, to support the request to adjust fiscal constraints. The updated price numbers from Madrid to Berlin and from Paris to Rome, which bring inflation to 3.2% on an annual basis both in the EU and in the Eurozone from 2% at the beginning of the year (1.7% for the Euro area), also suggest to Brussels that the emergency has arrived. Hence the new letter announced by the Prime Minister, who is pushing to put the issue back on the agenda in next week's meetings also on the basis of the fact that since the beginning of the year the price of oil has increased by 80% and that of natural gas by 156%. The request is to take greater account of the inflationary impact in the mechanisms of public finance constraints. The point is not the extra-trade deficit of the national safeguard clause, a dossier that runs in parallel in view of tomorrow's Council of Ministers on the new public finance program, but the "ordinary" system of European fiscal governance, which revolves around the pivot of the trajectory of net spending traced, in a now archaeological 2024, with the aim of keeping the debt at bay.
In the scenario overwhelmed by the fever of energy prices, tomorrow's Council of Ministers therefore becomes the first stage of a more complex path, which passes through the Eurogroup and Ecofin scheduled for 8 and 9 October; where, moreover, the discussion on a European taxation of the extra profits of energy companies is also planned, again at the Italian request (with Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and Poland). To argue the pressure, Meloni adds that he shares the invitation to "wake up" made to the EU by the president of Confindustria Emanuele Orsini; wake up to abandon "ideology" and "come to terms with the fact that some measures, instead of solving problems, risk creating them". The most striking example? The "long-standing affair" of the ETS, with the revision proposed by Brussels which it deems "totally insufficient" to which it contrasts the six recipes agreed on Tuesday in Prague with the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. "We cannot continue to burden our manufacturing companies with extra environmental taxation, further damaging their ability to compete in a global market in which our main competitors are not subjected to the same level of carbon costs and the same constraints", says the Prime Minister. «Not understanding this means condemning Europe to deindustrialization». Meloni looks to the production system when he confirms his intention to activate the entire 14 billion extra-trade deficit (0.3% of GDP in both 2027 and 2028) provided for by the national safeguard clause for Italy, in a framework which, as anticipated in yesterday's Sole 24 Ore, should therefore focus on the defense chapter the "renunciations" to find an agreement with the EU after the confirmation of the 2025 deficit at 3.1%. The energy sector was moreover politically more crucial (and less slippery) for the Government since the spring negotiations, before the price data put it more and more at the center of the agenda from month to month.
The resources of the clause, Meloni reiterates, will be used "to structurally lower energy prices for businesses". This defines the double track of the Government's strategy. The first aims to help families with the farewell to car tax for 2027 and the discounts offered, following careful moral suasion, by the main oil companies, in a list which, as emerged yesterday evening, should soon also include Tamoil thanks to the "very well underway discussions" with the Libyan Government, as Palazzo Chigi makes known. The other instead aims to concentrate the additional resources of the safeguard clause on businesses, to which it promises again, in one of the next Council of Ministers, the extension of the simplifications of the single SEZ. The pivot for the activation of the clause despite the 3.1% confirmed by Istat for 2025 is represented by this year's deficit, which in the new public finance program could also fall to 2.7-2.8%, below the 2.9% assumed so far. This is due not only to real growth heading towards 1% versus the +0.6% expected in April, but also to inflation. Which works a bit like alcohol on public accounts: it has an immediate beneficial effect, because it boosts revenues, fuels fiscal drainage and increases nominal GDP, but the initial euphoria is followed by the migraine produced by the indexed items of pensions and single allowances and by interest on BTp: another decisive factor in measuring the real possibilities of increasing the deficit without mortgaging the near future on the altar of the emergency.
