No dice. The public finance document that will be examined today by the government will report under deficit 2025 the “3.1%” indicated by ISTAT.
The final notification from Eurostat will arrive at 11 a.m., an hour before the council of ministers meeting. But yesterday afternoon it was Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, in a meeting at Via XX Settembre with deputies and undersecretaries, who explained that the hopes nurtured since last summer of bringing the deficit down below 3% and thus exiting a year early from the EU procedure for excessive deficits were dashed against the final numbers. Because, as anticipated in yesterday’s Sole 24 Ore, the intense file work concentrated above all on the numbers of Superbonus and tax credits for companies was not enough. Eurostat has reportedly closed communications with Rome in the last few days, so a surprise at the photofinish remains in the realm of possibility, and would impose an unprecedented amendment to the Dfp. But out of theory all signs have gone in the opposite direction, and will be certified today by the tables in the Dfp.
Double Battle
The effort of the ministerial calculators developed first and foremost in the attempt to file down the deficit to 3%, bypassing with the second digit after the decimal point the rounding of the actual 3.07% (indicated by ISTAT on 3 April) that today pins the figure at 3.1%. Only a handful of millions would separate the Italian accounts from that result, which in any case would not have been sufficient to take the way out of the EU excessive deficit procedure this year. For this second objective, a European Commission spokesman reiterated yesterday, a deficit ‘below 3% of GDP’ is needed. But to get there there is still an abundant billion missing (one decimal of GDP 2025 is 2.26 billion).
The fable of the ‘electoral manoeuvre’
The ballet straddling the Maastricht threshold has ended up focusing attention on data from the recent past for a document that should instead look to the future. And it is not complicated to foresee the controversy that in the coming hours will once again invest the EU Pact and the supporting statistics. But the idea, cradled by many majority parliamentarians, that a few million too many deficits would be enough to build a cage on economic policy that would otherwise be free to fly towards all-out spending and towards the ‘electoral manoeuvre’ that has been fabled about has little foundation. Because, even outside the procedure, the accounts would have been forced into the spaces of the net primary expenditure trajectory, the central parameter of the EU Pact, already absorbed by the last budget law according to the calculations of the public finance programme of October 2025. The only available margin, net of the updates that will arrive with today’s Dpf, is for now confined to 2028, and is worth 0.1 per cent of net expenditure: a little over a billion in all.
No suspension
What would really change the picture would be the suspension of EU constraints provided for ‘in the event of a serious economic downturn’ (Article 25 of Regulation 2024/1263), but so far the Italian hypothesis has not found support in Brussels. The dossier does not promise any developments in the short term, because there is no recession in Europe on the radar of the basic forecasts. Everything will depend, however, on developments in the Gulf crisis, about which there are currently no certainties. Not even the Dfp will give them, which in the central scenario will indicate growth of around +0.5% this year, in line with Bankitalia, a deficit of 2.8-2.9% and a further increase in debt compared to 137.1% in 2025, due to the effect of 51 billion of ‘stock-flow adjustment’ determined by the fallout of the old tax credits, starting with the Superbonus. Alongside, as has been inevitable for years, there will however be more complicated alternative scenarios, based on worse variables in relation to oil prices and interest rates. And destined to quickly put anguish over the 3.1% to rest.
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