The pressing of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, has hit the target: the Government changes the maneuver and lowers the 2019 deficit from 2,4 to 2,04% on the GDP spending cuts of 7 billion euros and hoping to cash in on the resignations. With these credentials, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, accompanied by Economy Minister Giovanni Tria, presented himself yesterday evening at the meeting in Brussels with the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was in turn accompanied by Eurocommissioners Moscovici and Dombrovkis .
In essence, Conte has signed an armistice with Europe and the markets have anticipated its meaning by already lowering it by 13 points yesterday the BTP-Bund spread. Today the contents will be known better but Conte made it clear that the remodulation of the maneuver is the saving of resources they do not cancel the basic income or the pension advance, even if the ways and times of the two symbolic measures will change, as will emerge from the measures connected to the budget maneuver on which confidence in Parliament was requested.
The European Commission will evaluate in detail how effective the review of the maneuver really is in the coming days, but already yesterday evening Brussels acknowledged that "good progress" has been made in the dialogue with Italy. It was also indirectly giving a hand to the yellow-green government the overrun of 3% of the French deficit after Macron's concessions to yellow vests, even if Brussels was quick to point out that the difference in the public debt of the two countries does not make the situations of France and Italy comparable. And this morning, Eurocommissioner Moscovici, in a hearing in the French Senate, froze Italy by saying that the Conte government's proposal "is insufficient". "It is a step in the right direction - said Moscovici - but we are not there yet, there are still steps to be taken, perhaps on both sides".
In the next few days it will be better understood whether the ones adopted by Italy are simple accounting tricks whether or not they will continue to weigh on subsequent budget years, but on a political level the sense of the operation is clear: the Government gets a truce both from the EU and above all from the markets but it has to do backtracking on the scope of the promises that Lega and Cinque Stelle had done in the electoral campaign and to the bravado originally shown towards Europe. However, the devil is always hidden in the details.
