Re Pnrr projects? Europe opens up in Rome, but confrontation is firm

Looks like the government has got a file Brussels What he asked for, regarding the implementation of the national recovery and resilience plan. However, the lack of understanding among the public offices in Italy – as well as in the majority – threatens to return everything to square one. From Brussels, the game of flexibility that Rome demanded in deploying resources seems more difficult to pursue every day. Not because it does not allow redefining some projects. On the contrary: European Union Commission For some time it has indicated its willingness to rewrite the plan, but at the moment there are no concrete signals from Italy on how to proceed, and this silence is starting to raise questions in the EU capital.

Since last fall, it has been demonstrated in Brussels, Rome’s envoys made it clear that Pnrr needed to be partially redesigned. They have said that various aspects of the system launched by Mario Draghi’s government are not working and that others have not been able to meet the 2026 deadline. Since his first weeks in office, Rafael Vito, Minister for European Affairs in charge of Pnrr, so let his European interlocutors have said he would have liked to review Part of the plan: Some projects had to be exited and replaced by others that should have entered.

Brussels’ response, according to what was possible to rebuild, was similar to the one then formalized European Council on 9 February. The conclusions of that summit were as follows: Existing European resources must be deployed more flexibly. Therefore, even formally, Italy had what it wanted. The government will be able to move some of the Pnrr projects, which are now delayed, towards the longer maturities of traditional European funds.. And it will be able to completely cancel other projects and introduce new ones, within the recovery cutoff of 191.5 billion. But in informal talks, the European Commission has made clear to the government some conditions for exercising this flexibility. The first is about timing: Projects can be moved outside and within the plan but – at least for the time being – the 2026 deadline for implementing the $191.5 billion spending was by no means in question. The second was above all a request to exercise flexibility, not sentence, on the basis of large general chapters, but to provide as much detail as possible and as quickly as possible. In particular, Commission Services has called on the government to indicate concretely which projects will be removed and placed on Pnrr as they come up; Even before you have a complete and final image of the entire rewrite.

It seems that this is exactly what did not happen between Rome and Brussels. After months of discussions in principle about Pnrr – as far as it turned out – no comparison of the merits of the measures to be released and their introduction has begun. Not even in part, not even in the first projects, which in theory should have been available.
There are no official explanations for the reasons for this apparent delay in opening the new negotiations. To be sure, Veto intends to present the case for implementing the Penal Code to Parliament in about a month’s time. Then one must understand what is not working and must be removed, and therefore how many resources can be funded for new projects. to Brussels today we do not have these estimates, also because the Regis database of the Pnrr implementation can only be accessed by the relevant Italian departments. But the same lack of detail creates the impression, in the EU Commission, that Vito himself does not receive from other Italian administrations all the details necessary to understand how much should come out of Pnrr. Presumably, few offices want to risk losing the money already entrusted to them. But without an estimate of the financial volumes that were released in the plan, it will be difficult to determine the new measures that could be introduced. So the times for giving a concrete signal, from Brussels’ point of view, are getting increasingly tight.