Dense in Bari among the Coldiretti steak houses. The mantra is to “remodulate” the Pnrr

Bari – On the seafront of Bari, the Coldiretti village is all a waft of zero kilometer delights, caciottas, scagliozze, popizze and salamelle. But what resonates is not the timing of the steak house of “exclusively national” meats, but that of the Pnrr, declaimed by the Minister of European Affairs Raffaele Fitto both in the inaugural conference and in discussions with journalists.

The line of the Salento politician is all linked to a verb, repeated like a mantra: “Ri-mo-du-la-re”. Together with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, since the electoral campaign, he has chosen to address the dossier of the recovery and resilience plan with the category of reality, forcefully reaffirmed from the stage: “We asked for monitoring of the 2014-20120 spending funds. Well, in nine years we have used only 34% of the resources”. The reference is to the slowness of the administrative machine, combined with the context: “This tool was imagined before the war, with the energy crisis that changed priorities”.

From here emerges the salient political passage: “We are – attacks Fitto – at the end of April 2023. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan must complete all the interventions definitively in June 2026: we have three years, a reasonable time in which, given that today we are engaged in the remodulation phase, it is advisable to carry out a careful analysis and verification to understand, not who to penalize and who to reward, but which sectors and which situations are able to spend these resources by June 2026 with absolute certainty “.

So the remodeling. Fitto speaks of a “necessary truth operation”, and of “a phase in which it is important to understand what to correct in order to avoid losing resources. All this thanks to a transparent operation and constant dialogue with the players in the field”. The minister, who coldly greeted the governor Michele Emiliano in the front row, also dwells on the method: “This is a phase that we are developing these days, with a very positive discussion with all the ministries concerned, trying to understand which are the critical points”. Here, the ministries and non-ministries and the regions, among which the Emiliano-Decaro-De Luca-Bonaccini dem axis shines, constantly polemical towards Palazzo Chigi.

Fitto comments: “When a clear picture emerges, we will have the opportunity to start a remodeling”. Here is the timing: “This will not happen before the expected conclusion for the implementation of the Pnrr and its amendments”.

Between the lines of the day there is also the commitment of Fitto in consolidating the resources of the Pnrr for agriculture: “It has a program of around five billion euros. During the control room with the trade organizations, we have already had a useful discussion on the possibility of being able to implement some interventions which in the agricultural field have shown to have a number of questions clearly higher than the financial resources available”. The rest is Melonian pride, with the praise of the government’s initiative against “synthetic food”, the commitment of Minister Beppe Valditara to strengthen technical institutes, and the attention of Undersecretary Marcello Gemmato on the quality of food in school canteens. The president of Coldiretti, Ettore Prandini, in his speech reminded the Emiliano governor of the delays of the Regions in spending European funds for rural development: “It is unacceptable not to spend fundamental resources for our businesses”.

Initially, the Apulian emir did not argue, using the periphrasis “we are always governmental”, but a few steps from the conference space he reserved the usual jab at the government: “We have not yet understood what Minister Fitto has in mind and what the his strategy, he continues to say that the Pnrr was written badly. Or, to be polite to Draghi, he says that the war has changed the assumptions. But we don’t understand what the strategy is”. The crux concerns the arrival in Puglia of the foreseen funds “with projects blocked due to the detention of the Pnrr, of European funds and of the Fsc which serves to co-finance European funds”.