Anfia denounces: EUR 4.6 billion cut to the Automotive Fund

At the heart of the deepest crisis for the automotive sector, both in Italy and in Europe, a new front of confrontation is opening, this time over the Automotive Fund allocated by the executive and heavily reduced in the Manoeuvre. Raising the alarm is Anfia, the Association of companies in the automotive supply chain: 'The government has cut EUR 4.6 billion from the Automotive Fund, earmarked for the adoption of measures to support the reconversion of the supply chain,' the Association writes in a note. Late in the afternoon, after the news had triggered reactions and stances even from the trade unions, the Minister for Enterprise and Italian Production Adolfo Urso intervened.

"We are committed to ensuring that the automotive supply chain has the tools it needs to meet the challenge of transition," Minister Urso wrote in a note. "All resources will go to production investment, with particular attention to components, which is the real strength of Italian-made products. The minister therefore tries to shift the focus from support to demand - incentives - to aid to supply, hence to manufacturing companies, but the alarm remains very high.

"The cut envisaged by the Budget Bill to the already scarce resources allocated in 2020 is an unacceptable thunderbolt that blatantly contradicts the important work that the government is doing in Europe in favour of the sector to improve regulation, and cancels months of intense work by the Automotive Development Table, which led Anfia, social partners and regions to propose an action plan to the government to support the supply chain,' explains the Association led by Roberto Vavassori.

The voice of the industrialists is joined by that of the trade unions, which join the alarm raised by Anfia. "At a time when the entire automotive sector is in a phase of profound transformation and crisis, strong support is essential to ensure the competitiveness of the sector, the defence of employment and technological innovation, which is indispensable to face the challenges of the future," write the national secretariats of Fim, Fiom and Uilm.

'This ignores an entire sector and the demands of more than 20 thousand workers,' they add, 'who took part in the national strike and demonstration in Rome last 18 October to demand concrete support. This mobilisation, instead of finding a listening ear and a positive response, was followed by a measure that goes in the opposite direction to the one desired, jeopardising the future of thousands of families and the survival of a strategic sector for the country'.