The stage of politically finished easy electoral promises on how to spend EU funds, the most arduous phase is now opening which concerns the will to reform and the political capacity of the government coalition which must pass through the parliamentary halls for approval. It will be a challenging job as many of the reforms announced in the different chapters of the “Guidelines” they obviously postulate the modification of various and important laws in force, in addition to the equally demanding electoral law.
It is therefore surprising that in the fourth chapter of the "Guidelines", with a challenging and promising title“Supporting policies and reforms” (pp.24-35), the highlight is the policies while the reforms are only the side dish. It is therefore no coincidence that in the "Guidelines" it is equally surprising that no civil, criminal or administrative law is indicated that is still in force today to be completely quashed or revised and amended and corrected, even if on page 33 the revision of the criminal law is assumed, civil and corporate law, just to give an example. Instead, legislative reforms should be the main dish to be presented to the EU to make i credible expenditure projects to be financed with funds from the EU itself. In other words, if regulatory legislative reforms don't precede, EU money doesn't come.
It would therefore be appropriate to start immediately the search for the regulations to be amended to make the spending proposals feasible. To this end, an agile and small parliamentary commission could begin work, possibly assisted by an equally agile commission of technicians from every sector professionally capable of navigating the interweaving of the most diverse legislations.
For example, take the case of public administration of the central role assigned to it in the "Guidelines". It is well known to all those who have had to do with obtaining public funds that one has always had to follow a path always affected by the respect and intertwining of the rules of all legal, administrative, criminal and civil systems, together to those exercised by criminal and administrative justice such as the Tar, the Council of State and the Court of Auditors. The result is a regulatory and institutional labyrinth today increasingly strenuously defended by the respective corporations within the uncertain boundaries between politics and administration.
Today there has been much speculation about the positive effects potentially deriving from the new aggregate demand created by the spending of EU funds: financed with new debt to be repaid for 170 billion euros and grants of around 70 billion. The former will pass through the budgets of the public administrations, the latter reasonably only through the treasury of the Ministry of the Treasury. In total, it is about 210 billion euros with annual installments of about 70 billion. It is an amount of public expenditure which corresponds approximately to +8-9% of the total annual expenditure of the PA (870 billion); approximately twice the PA spending on gross fixed investment alone (40 billion in 2019). and 2 times the entire capital expenditure (60 billion).
The public administration will be able to offer and demonstrate that it has one such firepower to get EU funds? To this end, radically innovating with respect to the past, and the past tells us, it will be necessary to associate with each project the list of new procedures, new regulations that make credible the feasibility within the agreed times of execution of the same. It would therefore be time to let the political fog surrounding the various reform proposals evaporate, in view of the political and parliamentary debate that must accompany such evaporation. Once they were called zero-cost reforms, in order to hide the fact that, like today, they were reforms with high risks of a political and non-technical nature, as unfortunately the "Guidelines" allow us to imagine translucently.
