Clash over the Pnrr. The government, 'Thick misunderstood'

Tension is increasingly high on the PNRR dossier, with the government defending the work in progress on the revision of the projects, the EU urging not to reduce the ambition of the plan while the opposition asks for a parliamentary passage to clarify once and for all which works will be deleted. The minister responsible, Raffaele Fitto, denies that the cleaver will fall on the infrastructural ones, because the rewriting of the PNR does not target individual sectors but looks at a broader objective, that is, the effective ability to carry out the interventions by the 2026 deadline. Those that take longer could simply change location, i.e. be moved to the list of projects financed by cohesion or development funds, which have longer lead times and less rigidity in the rules. Fitto has been working for months on the rewriting of the plan, which should be in the home straight. But he does not consider it a dismantling, he specifies, distancing himself from an article in the newspaper La Stampa on his speech at the Festival of Criminal Justice in Modena. "Minister Fitto was misunderstood, he said something else", explains the colleague responsible for Enterprises and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso. For Urso the situation on the PNR is clear. "Everyone knows what has been done in this country: when maximum debt resources were requested, when projects were presented in a few days, one stacked on top of the other. Some have already been rejected, think of the stadiums. We do not make the same mistakes that previous governments have made: we will go to the confrontation prepared, aware and responsible", underlines the minister.

Even the head of Infrastructure, Matteo Salvini, defends the path identified by the government: "The goal as far as I and the government are concerned is to spend well and spend all the funds of the PNRR, especially those for infrastructure because we have an infrastructure gap with other European countries that we must fill so neither the return of funds nor the non-spending of funds is absolutely on the agenda; At most, some items can be restructured to others," he said, assuring that there will be "no renunciation of any project unless there are obvious time lags" for reasons of material implementation of the project. The president of the FVG Region and the Conference of the Regions, Massimiliano Fedriga, recalls that the revision will touch on some projects that today are "out of the historical context we are experiencing" and others that "were critical from the beginning". In addition, he hopes that it will be an opportunity to give "uniformity" to the interventions, because "it is not possible that there are second class regions such as Friuli Venezia Giulia that have a per capita PNR investment of one sixth of other regions". The opposition does not trust the executive's plans. "The government must stop messing up the PNRR. After the words of Minister Fitto, a parliamentary passage is necessary that gives certainty", ask the presidents of the parliamentary groups of the Democratic Party Chiara Braga and Francesco Boccia. Brussels meanwhile waits, willing to review the plan as it has already reported for months, and to "discuss" the revision of "targets to individual objectives" envisaged "that are no longer achievable due to objective circumstances". The invitation, however, is to "not lower its overall ambition". On the other front open in the EU, namely the release of the third tranche of funds, expected for over a month now, there is no news. "The work on our assessment" for the green light to the third installment of the Italian PNR "is still ongoing" and there are "constructive exchanges with the Italian authorities", they say from Brussels.