Duties, the government's strategy to help businesses

Giorgia Meloni is preparing to convene a task force of ministers this afternoon to assess, sector by sector, the impact of US duties on Italian production. There will be Giancarlo Giorgetti (Economy), Adolfo Urso (Enterprise), Francesco Lollobrigida (Agriculture), and Tommaso Foti (European Affairs), in addition to the deputy prime ministers. Then, with Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani, he should have a restricted meeting, in which the next moves could take shape, from the protections for the most affected categories to a possible mission to Washington on which, behind the utmost secrecy, diplomatic interlocutions and assessments of political opportunity are underway.

Instead, the mission to Washington could enter the short-term calendar. According to various sources, it could be placed in the first half of Easter week, before the arrival of US Vice-President JD Vance in Rome. A willingness in principle to schedule the bilateral with Donald Trump has reportedly arrived from the White House, which is why the intergovernmental summit with Turkey, scheduled for 16 and 17 April, has not yet been officially confirmed. But in-depth reflections on the trip are underway. From the Melonians the conviction has been filtering for days that, if the leader will fly to the US, it will be to exercise that role of bridge-builder between Washington and Brussels preached in recent months. It is not certain, however, that some European partners such as France, Germany and Spain see it that way. And in government circles the subject is treated with the utmost caution, without hiding the risk of a bilateral in the Oval Office on the very days when the EU (on the 15th) will launch its countermeasures to the duties on steel and aluminium.

The premier described the government as ready "to put in place all the tools - both negotiating and economic - necessary to support our businesses and sectors that are penalised". He reiterated that he was asking "strongly for Europe to review the ideological regulations of the Green Deal and the over-regulation in every sector, which today constitute real internal duties that would end up adding senselessly to the external ones".

Each of the ministers in the task force is preparing a report on the most exposed export segments, avoiding, it is reasoned in the executive, 'generalist readings' and 'alarmism'. The meeting (scheduled for 5.30 p.m.) will be connected from Luxembourg by Tajani, who in the coming hours at the Foreign Affairs Council in trade format will meet EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič for the fourth time in a few days.

Tomorrow at Palazzo Chigi, in the discussion with the business categories, internal solutions will be discussed above all, with the enterprises also pressing for the shift of resources from the Transition 5.0 Plan to development contracts. However, the government wants to move within a European framework, to prevent individual countries from moving independently, further widening the differences in favour of those countries that have more room for manoeuvre in their public accounts. Meanwhile, a reconnaissance of resources in the folds of the budget is underway. And the government's pressing, also made explicit by the Minister of the Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti, for the suspension or relaxation of the Stability Pact is considered crucial. A decidedly complex game, but one that, if won, could allow, according to widespread reasoning in the majority, for deficit interventions.