The day after the battle at the European Council and the "hard and frank confrontation" with Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore, urges Europe to "not make tragic mistakes" and warns that "the whole European building risks losing its raison d'etre". Italy would go on anyway. Conversely, "inertia - says the premier - would give our children the immense cost of a devastated economy". "We are not proposing forms of debt mutualisation - explains Conte -. Our budgetary effort will reach 50 billion".
Conte illustrates the Italian proposal to Europe: an extraordinary reconstruction plan that lives up to at least that of the Americans and Chinese, and a European Recovery Bond, that is, a common European debt instrument that allows us to rebuild the economic fabric -social of the Old Continent. Instead, it expresses clear opposition to those European colleagues who have re-proposed the Mes. Conte also confirms that with the April law decree "our overall budgetary effort will reach a threshold well above 50 billion" (including the 25 already launched). "We will put in place - he says - unprecedented support for financing for our economy, equal to that offered by the most ambitious policy packages approved in Europe these days". "More than a quarrel - he explains about the confrontation with Merkel - it was a hard and frank confrontation, because we are experiencing an emergency that is reaping a high number of victims among our citizens and is producing a severe economic recession. I represent a national community in great pain and I cannot allow prevarications. In Italy, but also in other Member States, we are forced to make tragic choices. We must avoid making tragic mistakes in Europe.
If Europe does not prove to be up to this epochal challenge, the whole European building risks losing, in the eyes of our own citizens, its raison d'etre "." To colleagues who reasoned in Mes - he continues -, I replied that there is no reason to worry, because this is not what we need now. The Mes is a tool built to provide relief to individual Member States experiencing financial tensions linked to asymmetric shocks. The coronavirus is instead causing a symmetrical shock, with the effect of depressing, in a synchronous and completely unexpected way, our economic and social systems ".
"In the April decree, we will enhance all the tools available to us to protect the country's strategic assets, in light of a wide range of epidemiological, environmental, seismic, IT and geopolitical risks. Protecting our strategic companies is a priority for the government and we are also ready to introduce new and more sophisticated tools ", says Conte in his interview with Il Sole 24 Ore, speaking of the need to defend strategic companies from hostile climbs.
"At the moment it is premature to make predictions. But we hope to return to normal as soon as possible: we will reduce the restrictions until their complete elimination but we will do it gradually to avoid that the efforts made so far are in vain".
"We can already say that, as anticipated by Minister Azzolina, the suspension of school activities will continue even after April 3. These emergency weeks have shown us how indispensable the impulse to the digital transformation of the country is. With the Cura Italia decree we have allocated "85 million to enhance distance learning, especially for the benefit of the less well-off students. In addition, we have just released 200 million in funding from the committee for the spread of the ultra-broadband."