Defence: Italy finally says ‘yes’ to SAFE loans; Tajani: “We will request 14.9 billion by year‑end”

Brussels – Common defence: the Meloni government finally gives in and requests EU loans to support the sector’s revival. “We have decided to use SAFE by requesting funding of 14.9 billion by the end of the year,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani announced during a hearing before the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committees of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Italy has therefore chosen to draw on the special 150 billion euro loan facility and accept the amount the Commission had allocated to the country, following a standoff with Brussels, which had also pressed Italy to make use of the resources made available. The government is therefore taking on a loan that it will have to repay, but this will not be taken into account when calculating the debt under the common rules, which aim to exclude defence expenditure – considered a priority – from assessments of macroeconomic imbalances.

“As it has been set up, SAFE is a mechanism to finance military expenditure, not additional to that provided for in the budget,” argues the Defence Minister, Guido Crosetto, in front of the same parliamentary committees. For this reason, Crosetto insists, “as of today, SAFE is purely a technical choice to finance current defence spending.” Politically, however, the choice “is the budget deviation — which we will vote on, if we vote on it, in September: 0.9 for defence and 0.6 for energy.”