A fund of a few hundred million to finance new limited forms of early retirement, to be detailed next year once the latest budget law of the legislature has been brought home. This is the agreement found yesterday evening in yet another summit of the majority leaders in preparation for a maneuver which, in all likelihood, should arrive at the rescheduled council of ministers from today to tomorrow, late in the morning. Before the government meeting, other pieces will need to be finalized, starting with the methods of use of the energy safeguard clause, on which negotiations continue with the European Union, characterized by a certain optimism on the part of the government.
The biggest obstacle, however, was domestic. Once again, the social security chapter was blocking the path towards the maneuver, with the veto placed by the League last week: without measures on early retirement, the Northern League leader Matteo Salvini had clarified, the party would not have voted on the budget law. The stalemate around the Northern League proposal on the option of early retirement for 64-year-olds (with 36 years of seniority in a weakened replica of the old Quota 100) has been overcome, postponing the decisions to January: as in 2018, but with less money available, the maneuver will be limited to setting aside a fund of a few hundred million, to open channels of exit flexibility to a few selected audiences.
However, another variable intervenes to complicate the social security situation. The package of coverage of the maneuver also includes a new intervention on the indexation of pensions. When inflation grows, the mechanism that links checks to price dynamics inevitably becomes relevant again, because it multiplies costs. Hence the hypotheses, confirmed by multiple sources, of returning to working with scissors on indexation, in a more profound way as the check increases. The model is the one used in 2023-24, when the full revaluation was guaranteed only for pensions up to four times the minimum, while for the highest amounts a decalage was introduced which rapidly fell from 85% for payments between four and five times the minimum down to the 32% foreseen for the highest brackets. At the time, with galloping inflation due to the war in Ukraine, the measure guaranteed coverage of 2.1 billion in 2023 and 4 billion per year in the following two years. Today inflation is not at those levels, and the objective would also be lighter, falling within those 1.7 billion that the latest budget program sent to Brussels (Dpb) labels under the heading "other expenses" to be reduced. The revaluation percentages to be assigned to the various benefit bands are also being defined, in a range of hypotheses that depend on the overall structure of the maneuver. But it is not difficult to understand the political delicacy of such an intervention, which would also protect the revaluations of the lowest pensions and could reiterate some additional support for the minimum ones.
The summit - which was attended by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Minister of Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti, the Deputy Prime Ministers Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini and the leader of Noi Moderati Maurizio Lupi - was then the dossier of the banks. The set of measures called for to collect the 5 billion euros included in the budget program sent to Brussels has been refined, but for its definitive form we will have to wait for a meeting between the Deputy Minister of Economy Maurizio Leo and the Italian Banking Association (ABI), which could be held as early as today. In the scheme drawn up at last night's summit, there would be no place for a new increase in the national health fund, which would therefore have to follow the path already foreseen by the public finance trends: next year it would therefore go to 151.67 billion, from 148.84 billion in 2026. And still on the subject of healthcare, there is also room for a possible increase in the spending ceiling on medical devices (from 0.20 to 0.40% more) to cushion the effect of the payback paid by companies in the biomedical sector.
Also at the center of the comparison are measures for families and the middle class. Among the hypotheses in the field, the extension of the tax exemption to all first-time owned cars.
