NRRP, Fitto slams the door on Giorgetti: “Impossible to change 2026 deadline”

Brussels – The June 30, 2026, deadline for spending NRRP money will not be touched. EU Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin had already made this clear; Executive Vice President Raffaele Fitto reiterated it today (May 14). The message from Meloni’s man in Brussels is addressed to the Finance Palace in Rome, in response to pressure from Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti for an extension in order to be able to support increased defence spending.

Giorgetti, speaking yesterday at the Ecofin (EU Economy and Finance Council), asked his European counterparts to support “the exploration of further options, including the use of private sector funds and the possibility of extending the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience (NRRP) beyond 2026, to increase the budgetary margin available to member states and address the need to increase defence spending.”

Rome has already put and taken off the table several times the necessity of extending the NRRP deadline (the minister for European Affairs, Tommaso Foti, a few months ago, had reassured Fitto that the government would not ask for extensions). Now, the leghist minister has indicated it as a possible solution for the use of SAFE, the 150-billion loan fund to increase military spending, which Italy “does not intend to use because of issues related to the keeping of public accounts, in particular debt and deficit, as established by the stability pact.”

Not way. Twenty-four hours later, during the press conference presenting the new simplification measures for the Common Agricultural Policy, Fitto recounted that “even yesterday, during the debate at Ecofin, I made it clear that the deadline is set for next year, and it is impossible to change it.” The executive vice president of the European Commission pointed out that Brussels has already “offered many opportunities to reorganize the NRRP in the coming months, such as the use of Article 21 of the regulation for further revisions and the possibility of transferring projects from the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) to the Cohesion Funds.”

Along the same lines is the EU Economy Commissioner, Latvian Valdis Dombrovskis, who reconstructed the assessments made by Brussels in drafting the “Readiness2030” plan for the continent’s rearmament. “We evaluated several options on how to provide more defence funding,” Dombrovskis said, including “the possibility of using Recovery also for defence purposes.” An option discarded “for a number of reasons,” because it “requires a rather significant rewrite of the RRF regulation” and “a number of decisions that require unanimity.”

With just over a year to go before the final deadline, the European Commission does not seem to want to reopen the issue.

Italy, to date, has spent about a third of the resources agreed with Brussels on the nearly 270,000 projects in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.