Budget law, towards 1.8% motorway toll increase in 2025. Anti-Renzi rule pops up

As of April 2025, the municipal surcharge on passenger boarding fees for non-EU flights will rise by 50 cents. The measure included in an amendment to the manoeuvre of the rapporteurs filed in the Budget Committee concerns Italian airports with a traffic of more than 10 million passengers per year. According to estimates quoted in the technical report attached to the amendment, it would concern 6 airports - among the largest - and the increase in revenue that could derive from it is estimated at 5.33 million for 2025 (considering that the measure starts in April) and 8 million for 2026. The funds are then to be allocated by the municipalities for urban development and infrastructure works.

Here comes the government's amendment to the manoeuvre that makes the Transition 5.0 Plan simpler and more incentivising. Minister for Enterprise and Made in Italy Adolfo Urso explains that there are four substantial changes on which there is already the consent of the EU Commission: the procedures for calculating energy consumption are simplified; the possibility of cumulation with other national and European incentives is foreseen; a surcharge is included for photovoltaic panels made in Europe; and a single tax rate is defined for investments up to 10 million. "A strong impulse to support business investment in green innovation," said Urso. Targeted interventions are envisaged to simplify the procedures for calculating the reduction of energy consumption, enhancing the role of ESCOs and introducing a direct procedure for the recognition of benefits in the case of replacement of obsolete assets. Moreover, the plan becomes cumulative with the ZES tax credit and other facilities, including those offered by EU programmes and instruments. A single tax rate will be envisaged for investments up to EUR 10 million, while special attention has been paid to photovoltaic systems, whose incentive has been increased to zero the cost gap with modules and cells produced outside Europe. All the changes introduced will have retroactive effect.

The hypothesis of equalising the allowances of ministers who are also parliamentarians and those who are not has also surfaced. According to reports from various sources in the majority, the hypothesis would have emerged, along with several other topics, during discussions within the coalition on the manoeuvre and the proposal could be contained in an amendment by the rapporteurs. Non-parliamentary ministers would be paid the equivalent of what parliamentary ministers receive in expenses for the exercise of their mandate, for telephony and other items. These are supposed to be the measures outlined in the rapporteurs' amendment to equalise salaries between ministers-parliamentarians and ministers who are not parliamentarians. The measure also involves deputy ministers and undersecretaries.

The so-called 'anti-Renzi' rule has also popped up: a ban on paid assignments for subjects with registered offices outside the EU for members of government and members of parliament, MEPs and governors. A provision that entails, in case of non-compliance, the payment of the sums received to the Treasury. If this is not done, a fine of the same amount is envisaged. This is what is envisaged - according to information - in the amendment that the rapporteurs are preparing to present to the manoeuvre.

"The tax credit" provided for by Transition 5.0 "may be granted, as an alternative to companies, to Energy Service Companies certified by an accredited body for innovation projects carried out at the client company". This is provided for in another of the government's amendments to the manoeuvre, filed in the Budget Committee in the Chamber of Deputies.

In the manoeuvre 'there will be a levy on betting'. This was confirmed by Mef Undersecretary Federico Freni in reply to reporters who asked him about the hypothesis of a levy on online betting to allocate funds for sports infrastructures. 'I can't tell you whether finalised or not but there will be'.

"We are working. Over the weekend we hope to close the debate in parliament, at least in committee, as far as the budget law is concerned, and then move on'. Thus the Minister of the Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, speaking in Milan at the States General of Birth. A few minutes ago, added the Mef holder, 'I have just had a meeting on the last amendments that will be filed today'.

"We are all discussing today a GDP, yesterday I called it asphyctic, which is growing in Italy by 0.5, 0.6, 0.7 per cent, but no one is making an assessment of a different kind," and that is "the growth of GDP per capita, because this is a country in demographic decline," the economy minister continued. 'If we divide,' he reasoned, 'the GDP wealth by the number of inhabitants, alas, and I say this with a sense of bitterness, the per capita figure increases much more than 0.5 per cent'.

Every year the issue of the birth rate will become more and more serious and cannot be swept under a carpet, so I think it is absolutely necessary to have a forum, an agency, which is not simply a bureaucratic fixture but a bipartisan place, outside the logic of factional interests, of partisanship, with a long-term action'. This was said by the Minister of the Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, during his video link to the States General of the birth rate in Lombardy.

'An old country has no future,' he continued, 'an ageing country is not only unsustainable with the welfare that we imagined in the 1960s, when the country was young and growing. There will come a time when this debate will become an imperative, which politics will not be able to avoid, and at that point a third party could really come in handy'.