Brussels – High energy costs remain the main obstacle to the competitiveness of Italian industry, and emergency measures are no longer sufficient to tackle this issue. Speaking at the Assolombarda general assembly, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni once again called for a change of approach at the European level, announcing new measures regarding gas prices, fiscal flexibility, and digital investment. “If we do not develop structural, long-term solutions, we risk becoming increasingly at the mercy of emergencies,” the Prime Minister warned, referring to the measures adopted by the government to mitigate the effects of tensions in the Middle East and along the Gulf routes. These range from cuts to fuel excise duties and the floating excise duty mechanism to an appeal to the major energy companies to keep prices in check.
Energy, she stresses, is “the prerequisite that holds everything together and the factor that has the greatest impact on the competitiveness of our businesses.” Meloni points out that, in recent years, the government “has allocated over 60 billion euros to protect Italians from high energy prices.” Now, however, the Prime Minister is passing the buck to Brussels. Ahead of the European Council meeting on 15 and 16 October, Meloni sent a letter, together with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, to the President of the European Council, António Costa. According to sources at Palazzo Chigi, the initiative follows last week’s meeting of the informal Friends of Competitiveness group and aims to relaunch three key priorities: accelerating investment in strategic sectors, starting with energy and digitalisation; preventing the introduction of new bureaucratic burdens; and reducing the reporting obligations imposed by the European Union, particularly on small and medium-sized enterprises.
The link between administrative simplification, energy costs and industrial competitiveness is one of the key aspects of the initiative. According to Meloni, national measures risk failing to produce the expected results unless consistent European decisions accompany them. “We can introduce all the measures we want in Italy, even the most effective ones, even the most far-reaching ones, but we risk failing to achieve our goal if, at the same time, there is not a decisive change of pace on this front in Europe as well,” the Prime Minister said.
One of the government’s priorities is to keep the price of gas used to generate electricity in check. On this issue, Meloni explained, discussions with the European Commission – initiated by the Bollette decree – are at an advanced stage. “We are confident that we will soon reach a mutually agreed solution,” she said, outlining the aim of establishing a mechanism that can reduce costs for households and businesses. The Prime Minister again criticised the European ETS system – the certificates that impose a cost on greenhouse gas emissions – arguing that it could create imbalances between Member States and put European manufacturing at a disadvantage compared to international competitors, who are subject to less stringent environmental constraints. “If a steelworks closes in Lombardy and we end up buying that steel from the other side of the world, produced to much lower environmental standards, the planet gains nothing from it; on the contrary, it loses out,” she observed. This stance brings the issue of compatibility between the green transition, the protection of industrial production and global competition back to the fore.
At the European Council, the Prime Minister also intends to reiterate the call for greater fiscal flexibility to offset the effects of inflation on public spending. The issue has already been addressed by the Minister for the Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, at the Ecofin meeting. According to Meloni, rising prices lead to higher automatic state expenditure through items such as pensions and the universal child allowance, as well as to higher costs for public works projects already underway due to higher raw material prices. The Prime Minister explained that this amounts to billions of euros in additional expenditure that does not stem from new government decisions, but from external factors. However, these resources end up taking up the leeway allowed under European rules, reducing the margins available to support businesses, investment and growth. For this reason, she argues, greater flexibility would represent a proposal that is “simple, based on common sense, as well as responsible.”
On the industrial front, the president of Confindustria, Emanuele Orsini, insisted on the need to move beyond ideological approaches and to tackle energy costs as a national priority. “Energy cannot be politicised; there can be no left, right or centre when it comes to energy,” he said, describing it as an essential element in safeguarding the country amid fierce international competition. Above all, Orsini called for the creation of a genuine single European energy market, highlighting the difficulties in energy supply between EU countries. “If I want to buy energy from Spain today, I cannot do so because it stops in France,” Orsini said, calling for a system that would allow energy to be purchased from Spain and Portugal without the current obstacles to interconnections. The president of Confindustria then called on the government to speed up work on the ‘Bollette’ decree. Some of the measures envisaged, he argued, “could become law immediately, without waiting for the conclusion of the entire consultation process with Brussels.”
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
