2027 Budget Law, government opens dialogue only with Cisl: Cgil and Caritas against the cuts

The 2027 budget law has drawn its first organised criticism from trade unions and Caritas, who consider it detrimental to the weakest sections of the population. Three areas are under scrutiny: cuts to teaching and support staff in schools, tighter pension rules, and funding deemed insufficient for public healthcare. This is reported by Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Messaggero, two outlets that independently reconstruct the critical front and the content of the measure.

On the procedural level, the government has so far chosen to engage with a single union interlocutor: Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani telephoned Cisl secretary Daniela Fumarola, setting up a meeting dedicated to amendments to the budget law. No similar contact has so far been reported with Cgil and Uil, which remain excluded from the table discussing adjustments to the text.

The distance between the government and the rest of the trade union front emerges clearly in the statements gathered by the two outlets. The director of Caritas Italiana, Don Marco Pagniello, sums up the risk inherent in the cuts to public healthcare as follows:

“The risk is pushing people towards the private sector” — Don Marco Pagniello, director of Caritas Italiana

Cgil takes a similarly critical stance, challenging the overall framework of the budget law with an equally direct formula:

“Help is given to those who are well off, while those who are struggling are abandoned” — Cgil, trade union

Beyond the debate over social measures, the text of the budget law also contains a less discussed but significant provision concerning the financing of politics: an article reduces the tax deduction on donations to political parties from 26 to 19 per cent, for amounts between 30 and 30,000 euros per year. The measure concerns a mechanism of indirect support for parties through tax policy, and is part of a budget package that, overall, trade unions and Caritas describe as skewed against the most vulnerable groups.

The confrontation between the parties now hinges on the timetable for amendments: Tajani’s opening to Cisl alone leaves open the question of how the government intends to handle the requests for changes that will also come from Cgil, Uil and the third-sector world represented by Caritas. The meeting set with Fumarola remains, for now, the only publicly disclosed channel of dialogue on the matter of amendments to the budget law.