Government sends €23.5 billion Budget Document to Brussels

The Italian government has sent the Documento Programmatico di Bilancio to the European Union and Parliament, within the deadline set by the EU governance calendar. This is confirmed by Corcianonline and the Governo.it portal, according to which the executive is now awaiting Brussels’ ruling on the energy efficiency and defence measures that Italy has asked to have excluded from the deficit calculation.

The Document, worth €23.5 billion overall, was approved by the Council of Ministers on 13 October on a proposal by the Minister of Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti. The largest item, according to Corcianonline, is the one dedicated to family and social policy: around €5 billion, with a 0.21% impact on GDP, aimed in particular at the most vulnerable households. This is followed by defence, with an allocation of nearly €5 billion (-0.19% impact), and a €3.5 billion chapter reserved for businesses.

On the coverage front, the main source identified by the government — net of the deficit flexibility requested from Brussels — is the banking and insurance system, called upon to contribute around €5 billion this year. The contribution, Corcianonline also reports, is expected to decrease in subsequent years, a sign of a measure conceived as temporary rather than structural.

The choice to place family and defence as consecutive priorities reflects two different pressures that the government had to reconcile within the same text: on one hand, support for lower incomes amid high energy costs, to which the Document’s largest spending item is allocated; on the other, commitments made at European and Atlantic level on military spending, which now weigh steadily on Italian public finances.

The question of flexibility remains open. The Document was sent “pending Brussels’ approval of the measures on energy efficiency and defence,” as Corcianonline writes: a formulation suggesting that part of the budget’s financial soundness depends on a decision that lies not with the Italian government, but with the European Commission, which must assess whether those spending items can be excluded from ordinary budget constraints.

The contribution from banks and insurers, concentrated in the first year and decreasing in subsequent years, also signals that the government chose not to replicate a structural levy on the financial sector, opting instead for a time-limited measure that will need to be replaced, in years to come, by other sources of coverage not yet detailed in the text sent to Brussels.