No triumph for Conte in Rome
A winner in Brussels, Italy’s premier faces
accusations of ‘surrender’ from opposition at home.
By HANNAH
ROBERTS 7/22/20, 7:21 PM CET
ROME — For
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the marathon EU budget negotiations
ended on a high note, after he announced Italy would be the biggest beneficiary
of the €750 billion coronavirus recovery fund.
But his
victory, celebrated with a triumphant fist bump in the early hours of Tuesday
morning, may be short-lived as the hard-fought compromise meets with harsh
criticism back home.
Under the
agreement hammered out in Brussels, countries must commit to following a
national recovery plan, including economic reforms, in order to access the
€312.5 billion grant portion of the rescue package designed to mitigate the
economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
The
agreement also gives a single EU government the power to delay payments if it
feels another country is failing to fulfill its reform pledges.
In Italy,
the conditions attached to the grants has evoked the specter of the so-called
Troika — the decision group formed by the European Commission, the European
Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — that become synonymous with
punishing austerity in Greece in the wake of the 2015 debt crisis.
Salvini
claimed reforms imposed by the EU would damage Italy, and make it less
competitive.
Critics on
the right say the deal weakens Italian sovereignty and warn that it could lead
to EU demands to reverse populist-led legislation on pensions and welfare.
The
coronavirus is a “Trojan horse” that has allowed Europe to take control of
Italy, claimed Roberto Fiore, who heads the extreme-right Forza Nuova party.
“The Troika have won,” he said on Twitter. “We get €68 billion in grants at a
very high price — every last residue of our sovereignty.”
Matteo
Salvini, the leader of the far-right League, also attacked the deal, saying the
conditions attached to the recovery fund amounted to “an unconditional
surrender” by Italy.
Italy will
be forced to make Europe-mandated reforms when it comes to pensions, work,
justice, health and education, said Salvini. He accused the leaders of the
so-called “frugal” northern countries, including the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte,
of seeking to dismantle his flagship reform, which reduced the lowest
pensionable age to 62.
“Any Rutte
that comes along next spring and says ‘I won’t give the money to Italy if they
don’t cut the pensions’ can do it,” he told a press conference at the
parliament in Rome on Tuesday.
In reality,
Rutte failed to secure a veto on payments to countries that reneged on
commitments, instead negotiating a “super emergency brake” whereby individual
states can delay payments by up to three months, subject to review by EU
leaders and under the oversight of the European Commission.
The
Commission has also been explicit in stating that the national plans expected
of EU countries will be a far cry from the austerity policies demanded in
response to economic bailouts. Any reforms will be drawn from country-specific
recommendations made by the Commission, not competitor countries.
Still,
Salvini claimed reforms imposed by the EU would damage Italy, and make it less
competitive. He also warned that the mechanisms for disbursing EU recovery
funds could create leverage in disputes over other issues such as migration.
“When the
League returns to government and blocks the ports, at the first blocked boat,
Brussels will wag its finger and say we are nasty and mean,” he said.
Giorgia
Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, was also critical of
the deal, which left Italy with less access to grants than initially proposed
and at risk of “an unacceptable takeover of economic-political decisions of a
sovereign nation.”
The super
emergency brake “will work like a veto of another name,” she said.
The head of
the Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images
Euroskeptic
politicians weren’t the only ones to criticize the deal; even some pro-European
voices raised doubts about the deal. Stefano Fassina, head of the left-wing
Free-and-Equal party, called the conditions on grants and the emergency brake
“seriously risky.”
Carlo
Calenda, an Italian MEP and leader of the centrist party Azione — which ran in
the European election last year under the slogan, “We are European” —
criticized the Conte government’s “triumphant tones.” He pointed out that the
funding is less bountiful than it appears, given Italy is a principal
contributor to the EU budget. He also lamented the fact that frugal countries
and Germany secured greater rebates to their payments into the EU’s next
seven-year budget.
For Conte’s
government, much will depend on how it presents the deal, according to Raffaele
Marchetti, a professor of international relations at Luiss University in Rome.
Matteo
Salvini in Rome on April 23 | Riccardo Antimani/EFE via EPA
If it can
portray the outcome of the summit as a victory, it could help unite the
government ahead of a difficult decision on applying for further EU funding for
health care, according to Marchetti. The coalition is currently still divided
on accepting money from the European Stability Mechanism, which was used to
enact austerity on Greece.
The
imposition of reforms by the EU could also have a positive effect if it helps
overcome local resistance to painful but necessary measures, he said. “Brussels
has been useful in implementing reforms in the past.”
Among
Italians, the EU’s delayed response to the coronavirus crisis made many feel
they had been abandoned in their time of need. That feeling may be difficult to
reverse — one poll in April put the number of Italians with little or no trust
in the EU at 70 percent — but effective use of the new EU funds could help,
said Marchetti.
“Without
the money, Italy would have serious problems,” he said, “but the government
needs to communicate properly to citizens the added value of the funding, which
they haven’t done so far.”
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