Spain highlights Meloni’s inadequacy on the Pnrr

“Ready!”was the campaign slogan. “Not much”, is the synthesis of government action. The unpreparedness of Giorgia Meloni can be evaluated on what is the most important government dossier, both for the impact on GDP in the coming years and for the country’s credibility in Europe: the Pnrr. And it emerges above all from the comparison with a country like la Spain which, in silence and without much controversy, has done everything Italy has only been talking about for eight months. The outgoing socialist government Pedro Sanchez has in fact presented in recent days in Brussels a request to amend the “Recovery plan” (the Spanish Pnrr) to which he also added the chapter RePowerEuor the European plan to deal with the energy crisis and to become independent of supplies from Russia.

With this instance Spain, which initially had requested only 70 billion grant (transfers) and waived the share of loan (loans), has decided to mobilize all the resources assigned to it: therefore 84 billion in loans and 10.3 billion in transfers of funds from the Next Generation Eu and RePowerEu. To get the resources, Madrid had to add to its plan 25 new investments and 18 other reformsdescribed in detail in a document of over 190 pages, with the aim of strengthening the business environment, attracting skilled workers, improving the sustainability of agriculture, etc.

With these additional 94 billion, the Spanish plan will be completely comparable to the Italian one, which is the largest in Europe (164 billion against 191 billion). According to the deputy prime minister and economy minister Nadia Calivino the implementation of the plan is already having a positive impact on the economy and the addendum requested in Brussels should amplify its effects: “The implementation of the plan as a whole will allow Spain’s gross domestic product to increase by up to three points on average until 2031,” he said. This is a remarkable estimate, nearly double that of the Bank of Spain which before the request to amend the Plan de recuperación predicted an impact of up to 1.75% per year. In any case, regardless of growth estimates, the interesting aspect of the comparison with Italy is that Spain is also the only country to have received the third installment of the Next Generation Eu (6 billion euros) already at the end of Marchbut the green light from the European Commission had already arrived in mid-February.

The situation in Italy is very different, dotted with controversies, delays, exchanges of accusations and institutional crises such as the one with the Court of Auditors on concurrent control. Let’s start with payments. The government has been at a standstill on the payment of the third installment since December, waiting for Brussels to complete the verification of the achievement of the objectives. There were several things that were wrong, the government had asked for an extension to put things right, the Commission has started some spot checks… the fact is that we arrived in June and the money has not been released. On the contrary, we are close to June 30, which is the deadline for the fourth installment. Difficult to have achieved the objectives of the fourth if there is still no certainty about those of the third. The government is forced to ask for a time freeze, thus postponing the request and the arrival of resources that are essential to transform the country and stimulate growth in a critical phase of the global economy.

From the modification of the Pnrrincluding Meloni and the Minister for European Affairs Raffaele Fitto they have been speaking for a year now – first during the electoral campaign and then from the seats of the government – ​​not even a shadow is visible. A sort of media tug of war also took place with the Commission on the possibility of changing the Pnrr, but in Brussels they have been waiting for these changes for months and in the end they never arrived. Same script for the RePowerEuwhich for months has been defined by Minister Fitto as “central”: many words on the “Piano Mattei” and Italy as a “gas hub” and we are still in the interim phase, without sending any final proposal.

What is then paradoxical is the political context. Why Meloni enjoys a solid and cohesive political majoritylike in Italy we haven’t seen them since 2008. While Sánchez was backed by a narrow “Frankenstein” coalition with the radical left and separatists and had to face an electoral campaign for the administrative elections from which he came out defeated and resigned. Now there will be early general elections. Despite this, in Madrid they achieved all the objectives of their Pnrr, received the money for the third installment and requested an update of the plan in addition to the RePowerEu funds. Yes, they were ready.

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• Luciano Capone

• Grew up in Irpinia, in Savignano. Studies in Milan, Catholic University. Liberal by training, journalist by deformation. Al Foglio first as a reader, then a collaborator, finally an editor. I mainly deal with economics, but also with politics, investigations, culture, miscellaneous and possible