the victory goes to Germany (which deludes itself that it can go it alone) – Corriere.it

Often regarded as the reluctant chancellor on anything to do with the European Union, Olaf Scholz will have returned to Berlin satisfied yesterday. Germany got everything it wanted and he hasn’t conceded anything he didn’t want, on the big issues that explained the convening of an extraordinary summit just yesterday.

Scholz’s will

The European Council was intended to coalesce a Union response to the challenge of the two trillion dollars in subsidies to industry offered by the American administration, with its plans on infrastructure (Build Back Better), on semiconductors (Chips Act) and on green technologies (Inflation Reduction Act). And finally an answer began to loom, except non-European: in Brussels it was decided that each country will have freer hands to do it on their own, without any new common project, either financially or industrially. what Scholz wanted from the start. Germany asked for greater discretion in distributing state aid from its budget – the most robust in Europe – to sectors affected by rising energy prices or by American competition in the green transition. So the German chemical, automotive or semiconductor giants are not excluded from the list of potential beneficiaries.

“Less” Europe

What Germany didn’t want was, essentially, more Europe. He didn’t want a relatively small fund, but in a short time, to accompany European industrial projects. Nor is the project of a broader strategic fund in perspective incentives industrial sectors on a European scale in the technologies of the future: from a semiconductor supply chain, to a battery production network, to a supply system for essential raw materials of the green transition up to – why not – the defense industry. All of this at the Brussels summit remains at the starting point while Berlin, and to a lesser extent Paris, will try to give national solutions – with coups of state aid – to the global problem posed by public interventionism by the United States and also by China. At most, Germany and France will only distort competition with other European firms in their favour.

Italy

Moreover, the conclusions of the summit do not even mention an idea that the government in Rome wanted to bring to the table and, even here, Berlin does not like: lightening the accounting impact – on the deficit – of investments in the sectors on which aid is now of state will be permitted. Without that special treatment – the golden rule that Mario Monti proposed in Brussels since 1999 and has never taken off since – Italy risks being able to distribute very few subsidies. Spending on them could in fact collide with the constraints of the Stability Pact: it matters little that the government in Rome can have more flexibility in the use of European funds, including those of the Recovery, as Italy actually obtained in Brussels.

The comparison

So the road remains long. It is probable that the German idea of ​​going it alone in the face of the Colbertism of the United States and China will soon prove illusory. In the presence of the two global technology giants, no European country goes beyond the status of a medium power constantly subject to risk of vassalage. For this reason the discussion on a strategic fund for European projects – with European management – will inevitably return. The idea of ​​treating investment intelligently when calculating the deficit will also come back. For that moment, Italy will have to be ready. Because political matches in Europe are not won with twists and turns, nor with those of anger. It takes a methodical, slow build-up of credibility, patient weaving of alliances, and the arguments to prove one’s case. The rest is just wasted energy.