"In the coming months we will launch a second package of interventions" to implement the measures on employment that will be decided at the next EU Council. Prime Minister Enrico Letta said this this morning as he spoke to the Chamber in view of the European appointment on Thursday and Friday.
According to Letta, “the EU will have to mobilize all available resources, anticipate as much as possible the Youth Employment Fund to have the first projects financed as early as January 2016, with resources concentrated over two years and not over seven. But that's not enough. We ask that in XNUMX there be a review of the instrument and an increase in the financial envelope”. As for the structural funds, “approximately 55 billion will arrive in Italy in the next seven years. We ask that support for young people's work take priority in programming". Finally, “we ask that the EU use the EIB, increasing credit granted to SMEsessential point of reference".
The Premier believes that in Brussels “the confrontation will be hard and important”, And“if it stops as it is, Europe is lost”. At the summit, "I will once again emphasize the drama of the job that doesn't exist - the Prime Minister said -, the more than 15 million young people without work and prospects", and above all "on a Europe that o gives concrete answers to problems or slowly dies”.
Letta spoke of a European Union "which is struggling to get out of the recession, where investments have fallen, where the credit taps have dramatically closed in some countries, where the shadows over the single currency have not yet completely dispelled", as demonstrates the fact that "two pieces of news from Karlsruhe and Athens were enough to give the sign that the crisis is not over yet, to immediately restore tension on the markets, to raise interest rates on our debt and that of other EU countries".
For these reasons, the EU Council "will have to build something stronger and more solid, not just stop the emergency", and will have to "to shy away from any downward solution – underlined the Premier -. Time is short, inertia must be opposed, the defense of rigid approaches, of national prerogatives”.
In short, Italy "wants to be at the forefront" in the fight against youth unemployment, and "for this reason tomorrow in the Council of Ministers we will approve a package of measures to help work and support families in difficulty - continued Letta -. And strengthened by this initiative, I will firmly ask that the EU not abandon the member states to themselves, but support them with visible, effective and concrete measures".
As anticipated in recent days, in tomorrow's CDM "forms of tax relief will be approved for companies that hire young people in difficulty or who convert fixed-term contracts into permanent contracts and measures to discourage the inactivity of young people with professional paths - confirmed the Prime Minister - These are choices independent of what will happen in Brussels, but who are in tune with the discussion”.
