Manoeuvre, evidence of agreement in Parliament on the accounts plan

The political confrontation on the path to the manoeuvre will come to a head today. On the negotiating table between majority and opposition should in fact end up the draft resolution on the contents of the Documento programmatico di finanza pubblica (Dpfp), the heir to the NaDef under the new EU fiscal rules. It may seem a matter of procedure. But the political substance is there; because what is at stake is the possibility of agreeing on the moves for the examination of the accounts programme, while waiting for the reform of the accounting law to incorporate the new EU Stability Pact into Italian law. In April, on the occasion of the (only tendential) Document that replaced the old Def, there was no agreement, because the opposition accused the government of keeping too many numbers locked in its drawers.

Now the attempt is to avoid a repeat of that scenario, which has so far also complicated the work on the parliamentary bill for the new accounting system, which is in fact still waiting to find its final form. The draft on which the majority is working, obviously under the watchful eye of the Ministry of the Economy as is always the case in these cases, in the eve's anticipations should ask the Executive for a series of elements capable of going beyond the contents of the NaDef; with the indispensable details to X-ray the evolution of the tendential at unchanged policies, which will be flanked by the first update of the programme written in the Medium-Term Budget Plan called to support the measures of the budget law and indicate the objectives of economic policy and public finance. The commitments requested from the Government by the resolution should also look at the Dpb, i.e. the framework of the manoeuvre to be sent to the European Commission, and at the Technical Note illustrating the Budget Bill, in order to give a complete overview of all the steps.

Much will obviously depend on how detailed these contents will be, in the resolution and then in the documents. In recent months, the opposition has repeatedly called for the individual main components of net expenditure, i.e. the parameter around which compliance with the new European constraints revolves, to be highlighted, and for a clearer comparison between tendential and programmatic, which was not exactly straightforward in the first budget programme.

The grid will then have to be filled with numbers, which will give a measure of the actual scope of the manoeuvre and the measures needed to finance it. But there is still time for those, because the Planning Document will arrive in the Council of Ministers on 1 October.

There, first of all, it will become clear whether the fall in yields on government bonds (see page 3) and the curbing of the rest of expenditure will allow the deficit to fall below 3% of GDP as early as this year, opening the door for an official exit from the excessive deficit procedure with the Eurostat audit in April 2026.