Since the entry into force of the Stability Pact in 2012, each EU government sends its draft budget for the following year to Brussels. The purpose of this pact, challenged at birth for its excessive rigor, was clear. Frame virtuous fiscal trajectories within the EU, to avoid the repetition of the Greek nightmare. In common currency, shared responsibilities.
For six years, the Commission has always agreed, after consultation. A method that has also allowed France, and others, to avoid several reminders to order. If the letter of the Covenant was stamped with a German rigor, his practice was actually much more flexible. Until yesterday.
For by rejecting the Italian draft budget for 2019, the Commission has, for the first time, vetoed one of the main symbols of sovereignty, and thus to enter unknown territory. This is probably what the so-called Conte government was looking for, which is, in fact, a Salvini-Di Maio government.
Pierre Moscovici, the European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, made it clear yesterday. " We are not facing a borderline case , but faced with a clear deviation, clear, assumed and by some even claimed, " commitments made.
What is it about ? Macroeconomic data do not tell the whole story. It is the composition of the future Italian budget and its validation procedures that make it a totally new case. As growth softens in the Peninsula, Rome gives up its promise to structurally reduce its deficit by 0.6%, and instead proposes to dig it by 0.8%.
A permanent election campaign
Above all, it intends to dig it to meet two election promises: the lowering of the retirement age and the income of citizenship. Two structural measures that will weigh on all future budgets, without their ability to boost growth can be demonstrated.
From an economic point of view, the debate on stimulus by spending is old. But the standoff between Rome and Brussels is clearly also a very political affair. A few months before the European elections, it is the "anti-Brussels" strategy that is staged by the League and the 5 Stars Movement.
More Giuseppe Conte repeats that his country does not want to leave the euro, the more his executive puts actions that increase the fears of an Italexit. By political will, which would be the expression of a strategy of hidden agenda of the sovereignist fringe. Or, more stupidly, by "inability to stay in the club," as former president Mario Monti fears.
The budget battle is therefore about one of the raw nerves of the European political landscape: the question of sovereignty. By dramatizing the war against the Brussels "bureaucracy", the Italian government is part of a permanent electoral campaign, in La Botte as well as in Europe, against its three favorite enemies. Migrants, Macron and Brussels.
Daily vilified by the Salvini propaganda, Pierre Moscovici and the Commission had no real choice. To yield would have meant to discredit oneself. Withdrawing the Italian budget carries the risk of fueling nationalist rhetoric. But, sooner or later, a truth must emerge from the populist leap forward. To dig up the debt without investing does not restore any sovereignty, it can at most establish a regime.