Relaunching European industry in the name of innovation

The ugly mess created by the new cut in innovation incentives, decreed by the Council of Ministers on 27 March, will not be easily remedied, because not only has it caused actual damage to many companies, driven to invest by a promise that was then not kept, but once again it has posed the question to us all as to whether this executive is only frantically pursuing events that it does not control, or whether it has a strategy to guide, or at least direct the reorganisation of our production systems in this difficult phase of the world. The Treasury Minister's answer, given in connection with the Cernobbio Forum, unfortunately leaves no room for illusions: 'We have to decide who to help in this phase', whether to buffer the effects of oil price increases or to compensate for the tariffs imposed on our exports. In other words, events over which we have no control are being played out, with interventions at our disposal which, however, affect the investments needed to support a structural change in energy production and the entire industrial sector. There is thus not only a lack of national strategy, but also a lack of teamwork at European level. The Industrial Acceleration Act, approved by the European Commission on 4 March last - specifying that public investments must now require a majority contribution of production made in Europe - pointed to the alternative energy production and higher technology sectors as the vectors of a new development, outlining a credible industrial policy path only if the decisions of all EU governments converge on this strategy, using all common instruments in a coordinated manner.

In the face of the now structural chaos created by the Trump administration, which is visibly oriented towards directly regaining control of the 'old' oil economy, and in the face of China's new Five-Year Plan, presented on 5 March, all aimed at supporting the new economy based on artificial intelligence and alternative energies with unprecedented investments, Europe cannot condemn itself to marginality by locking itself up in asphyxiated local economies, which are always threatened by growing political instability. It is time to react by jointly relaunching a common European industrial policy, starting precisely with the investments already decided in the supercomputing sector, a necessary infrastructure for any industrial development, knowing full well that the pivot of this action already underway, but not yet integrated in the respective government actions, is the Bologna-Julich-Bruyeres-Barcelona axis, on which an unprecedented computing capacity is being concentrated, which must, however, become the basis not only for a new economic development, but also for a new common political initiative.

The cut in innovation incentives has provoked a harsh reaction from industrialists, who have pointed out that it is the government's own credibility that is lacking, in a phase so dominated by global uncertainty, depressing even more the willingness to invest precisely in the sectors of greatest strategic importance. However, it is necessary to start again from this new disappointment in order to outline a new vision of development, which is clear that this situation, which has certainly become critical today, but which has been marked by years of production stagnation, can only be overcome by relaunching the role of a European industry, which has research, skills, and the work of our companies at its centre, in the interest not only of Europe, but also of this entire confused world.