EU Summit, Meloni: «With the ETS, industry is at risk». Then the compromise. 7-day extension of the Schengen ban with Spain

The wall of the "frugal" on the Ets. The clash with Spain over immigration. The additional flexibility linked to the "emergency" inflation raised together with Greece alone. Giorgia Meloni wore the helmet on the first day of a European Council in Brussels considered by all to be "difficult". More for Italy. And he received a compromise on the ETS overnight, i.e. the commitment to guarantee "a well-functioning carbon market" and, above all, to "update all the impacts of the ETS2, in particular with regard to its configuration and related safeguards". It is not the postponement of entry into force, but not silence on the issue either.

The game of flexibility

The Prime Minister brought to the leaders' table the issue of additional flexibility invoked in the name of a correct interpretation of the "relevant factors" for compliance with the spending rule at the center of the Stability Pact. Italian diplomatic sources report that Ursula von der Leyen has not commented, but "the Commission services are nevertheless studying the dossier". Complicated both by the need not to show any weakness on the public finances front in a moment of market turmoil and, above all, by the other Italian request to be able to use the extra VAT revenue to alleviate the burden of the cost of living on families and businesses, rather than allocating it to debt reduction.

Ets, axis with the Visegrad countries

But it is over energy costs and the revision of the ETS proposed with the Czech Andrej Babiš that the confrontation has ignited. Meloni finds the only support, in particular on the postponement of Ets2, of the Visegrad group: Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. With Babiš he offered two graphs for discussion. The first, developed on the basis of the EU ETS data viewer of the European Environment Agency (EEA), crosses the downward trend of CO2 emissions with the price increasing since 2020. "ETS emissions are collapsing, but European industry is losing ground", reads the comment. Even if critics, against reaching out to those whose energy mix is ​​still unbalanced on gas and oil, believe that it is proof that the mechanism works: the supply of emissions is reduced, therefore the price rises. Adding that the suspicions of speculation have been denied by ESMA, the European Market Authority.

The alarm about deindustrialization

The second graph, whose source is Eurostat, shows the declining share of industry (excluding construction) in total European GDP from 2021, with chemicals and fertilizers at -31%, steel at -16%, glass at -10 percent. «Europe is deindustrializing, especially in energy-intensive sectors», the diagnosis. Which in Meloni's words, in a discussion that lasted three hours, suspended and then resumed, became an appeal to stop the train before it derails, before the industry is "massacred".

The coldness of France and Germany