Italian minister Foti reassures Brussels on the NRRP: “We will not request extensions”

Brussels – Italy will not ask for any extensions for the implementation of the NRRP. “We must be consistent with our commitments,” said the minister for European Affairs, the South, Cohesion Policies, and the NRRP, Tommaso Foti. On a trip to the European capital for the EU General Affairs Council, Foti took the opportunity to meet with his predecessor Raffaele Fitto, now executive vice president of the European Commission, and assured him that Rome would conclude all projects – or nearly all – by June 30, 2026.

Foti thus dismissed persistent recent rumors that the Meloni government was pressing Brussels to delay the expected deadline for spending the nearly 200 billion in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. However, negotiations are underway, and the focus is on the possibility of combining the money Rome fails to spend into one or more funds from which it can then draw to finance new projects after the Plan expires. The conversation between Fitto and Foti was “fruitful and constructive to continue the work on the NRRP and cohesion policies in continuity,” the minister wrote in a post on his X account.

The lifeline — based on a model considered by Madrid — to avoid giving up “even a single penny” of the NRRP is awaiting approval from Brussels. The Fitto’s experts have already stressed that such a mechanism would be limited to a few measures because, with a broader perimeter, it would turn into a de facto extension of the NRRP.

In February, Rome should submit a new revision of the NRRP to the European Commission — the fifth since 2021. “Some measures are under my and the government’s attention to verify whether they have the concrete possibility of achieving the goals we set,” the minister explained at a press point at the European Parliament. Among the approximately 260,000 projects under consideration by the government, some are likely to have a time horizon far beyond June 30, 2026. On these, the government will propose to Parliament “possible amendments, which may be the last ones we can present in a time frame that must close possibly by April,” Foti said.

So far, Italy has received about €121 billion of the total 194 from Brussels. At the end of last year, the government asked for the payment of the seventh installment, requesting the disbursement of an additional 18.3 billion euros.