Salvini: a 10-year infrastructure plan

In 2032, according to the government's plans, the first train will run on the high-speed line between Turin and Lyon, the same will happen in the Brenner rail tunnel to connect Fortezza and Innsbruck in 25 minutes, and the Genoa breakwater will be operational to allow the port to really compete with Northern European ports starting with Rotterdam.

It is on this basis that Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini outlined his 'Ten-Year Plan for Infrastructure' at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio. In political terms, ten years are the two legislatures over which the government's umpteenth claim to stability is articulated despite the stumbles of recent days. On a more practical level, such a time horizon is indispensable to see the biggest infrastructures really developed, starting with the Bridge over the Strait for which Salvini returns to indicate the goal of the go-ahead from the CIPESS by the end of the year to allow work to begin; however, at this point, the start is confined to 2025, unlike the initial timetable that envisaged this year.

There is not only the future, however, in the shower of numbers offered to the audience of managers and entrepreneurs gathered in Cernobbio by a Salvini armed with slides. There is also the present of 22 billion euros of work in progress, which for Salvini 'also weighs on the increase in employment because on average every billion in infrastructure investment produces 17 thousand jobs'. And there is the final balance of the first year of the reform of the Procurement Code, which in ministerial calculations 'has in no way brought about the blockage that some feared but has allowed over 2.6 million tenders to be managed in 12 months'.

On high-speed trains, the focus is particularly on the south, with the line that from Bari will make it possible to reach Naples in two hours and Rome in three, creating a new alternative to the aeroplane as between Milan and Rome. "Because this is how the Green Deal is done," Salvini claims, reviving his own polemics with Brussels, "and not with a prohibition of the endothermic engine that makes no industrial, environmental or social sense.