Excise duties, from alignment between petrol and diesel possible 1 billion more for the state

When it comes to remodelling excise duties, technical hypotheses run rampant. But then they generally slide on a slippery slope of politics. Because around the numbers that change more or less rapidly on petrol station screens during refuelling a not marginal slice of consensus consolidates or crumbles, unquantifiable but very dear to leaders and would-be leaders.

In recent days, the video of Giorgia Meloni has been circulating again on social the video of Giorgia Meloni who in 2019, driving a car as well as a then small but rapidly growing opposition party, claimed to demand that 'excise duties be progressively abolished'. The year before Matteo Salvini, in the run-up to the elections that would later give birth to the gialloverde government, was more drastic in promising an 'immediate' farewell to seven old excise duties, which had survived all the country's successive political upheavals. But recent history also includes the measures of the Draghi government, which, in order to curb the jump in prices produced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, introduced temporary cuts in excise duties that were then repeatedly extended and revised until the end of 2022: with a cost of more than 8 billion euro that ended up mainly in the household accounts of the richest Italians, as was obvious for a cut in a tax revenue linked to consumption and as then certified by the Parliamentary Budget Office; according to which the decile with the greatest spending capacity obtained 6.5 times the resources that reached the poorest population.

In such a rough sea it is therefore better to jump in with the lifebuoy of a few certainties. The first is written in the annual catalogue of environmentally harmful subsidies, drawn up by the Ministry of the Environment to line up the tax rebates to polluting activities. 'In Italy,' we read on page 109 of the latest edition, 'the excise duty applied to diesel for motor vehicles is lower than that for petrol, and this is not justified in environmental terms'.

The issue has been more pressing since 2022, when the European Commission began to press in its 'Specific Recommendations' to Italy for a reduction of environmentally harmful subsidies, while at the regulatory level it began to call for abandoning the link between tax demands and the volume of fuels sold, typical of excise taxes, and measuring revenues according to the energy content and 'environmental performance' of fuels.

Within this framework, obligatory though sidereally distant from the slogans of electoral promises, the government is moving. How? The executive itself explains it in the Budget Structure Plan now before Parliament. On page 116 it stresses that 'the reorganisation of tax expenditures' is 'an area of reform of particular importance for the completion of the implementation of the tax delegation law'; and that among its main objectives is 'the alignment of excise duty rates for diesel and petrol'. It is all a matter of understanding what this "alignment" is.