La letter of Brussels has arrived. Signed by the Vice-President of the Commission Valdis Dombrovskis and the head of economic affairs, Pierre Moscovici, it is barely a page long. It is written that "Italy did not make enough progress to comply with the debt rule in 2018”. Now the Italian Treasury has 48 hours, until Friday, to send an explanation to the Community Executive justifying the violation of the rules.
In any case, next Wednesday the Commission will kick off the infringement procedure against our country, which will then be endorsed within two weeks by the sherpas of the finance ministers of the euro zone. After which a further technical step will be necessary in the Commission before the final decision, which falls to the finance ministers of the Eurozone, who will meet for theEcofin on July 9th. This is the exact deadline for Italy.
The yellow-green government therefore has five weeks to propose one corrective maneuver that puts public finances back on an appropriate trajectory. In theory, our country should produce a detailed list of measures that guarantee a correction of 23 billion euros for 2020. The value of a real financial maneuver, not one maneuver.
In the aftermath of triumph in the European electionshowever, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini, had already made clear the government's intention to return any correction requests to the sender of accounts. "If they tell us to do our homework by cutting spending - the words of the Northern League leader - We will not accept it. We want to base the autumn economic package on tax cuts. Yesterday's popular mandate is an invitation to do the opposite of what was imposed on us until last year with the Renzi, Letta and Gentiloni governments”.
If the government follows the line dictated by Salvini, on 9 July Brussels will launch the infringement procedure for non-compliance with the rules on public debt. At that point Italy will be forced to heavy adjustments of accounts for at least five years, up to the zeroing of the deficit to reduce the debt. If even in that case our country refused to obey, they would snap real economic sanctions.
