Meloni and Giorgetti, having hastily dumped Air France was an own goal: the ITA-Lufthansa alliance does not take off

The anxiety of immediately marking a turning point with respect to the choices of Draghi government in air transport he played a bad trick on Meloni government and to the Minister of Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, perhaps the best minister of the centre-right Executive, who this time however stumbled over ITA. Upon leaving Palazzo Chigi in October 2022, Mario Draghi had bequeathed to his successors an agreement to exclusively negotiate the future of ITA Airways with the rope Delta-Air France-Certares. Giorgetti, in agreement with Meloni, however, immediately rejected that option, giving priority to the Germans Lufthansa, always at the heart of the League for its attention to Malpensa airport. But all things considered, we can't really say that dumping the French was a happy idea. After more than a year of negotiations, the ITA-Lufthansa alliance has not yet received the green light from the European Antitrust Vestal, Margrethe Vestager which just in recent days has made it known that it demands route reductions to give the green light to ITA and the Germans and save European competition in air transport by avoiding price increases for consumers. Is it the underground revenge of the French? It's a sin to think badly, but sometimes you get caught. Of course, it hasn't always been a bed of roses between Vestager and Paris and the recent clash with the French President Emmanuel Macron on Artificial Intelligence is proof of this. But let's not forget that in telecommunications it was Vestager who opened the doors to Italy Iliad despite the fact that in our country - a unique case in Europe - there were already four operators. We still don't know how the ITA-Lufthansa alliance will end but one thing is certain: when it comes to financial and industrial operations, political prejudices, whether internal or external, are never good advisors. And the results are visible. This time Giorgetti ends up falling from the tower