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How Italy plans to spend its €222 billion coronavirus recovery fund

Italy's governing parties meet on Friday to discuss revised plans to spend billions of euros in EU post-virus recovery funds after initial proposals provoked a crisis in the coalition.

Published: 8 January 2021 11:55 CET
How Italy plans to spend its €222 billion coronavirus recovery fund
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in Brussels in December. Photo: AFP

The recovery fund is worth 222 billion euros in total, with most of it coming from a European Union fund allocated to help alleviate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

READ ALSO: How the EU agreed its €750 billion rescue plan to save shattered economies

Italy, which pushed hard for more EU support at the height of the crisis, is set to receive the largest share: 209 billion euros, or 28 percent of the entire rescue fund.

Under the leaked spending plans, 70 percent of the funding in Italy will go to investment and 21 percent for tax incentives and other bonuses.

The plan allocates 18 billion euros to the cash-strapped health service, with a further eight billion for tourism.

Other sectors to be prioritised are the transition to a greener economy (67 billion euros), education and research (26 billion euros) and transportation projects (32 billion euros).

Italy is due to submit its final plan to Brussels for approval by mid-April.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has previously described the recovery fund as “an opportunity for us to design a better Italy, to work on a serious, comprehensive investment plan that will make the country more modern, greener, and more socially inclusive”.

READ ALSO: 

Economists say entrenched structural problems have put the brakes on progress for decades. They include Italy's burdensome public bureaucracy, sub-par infrastructure, including slow adoption of digital technology, and widespread tax evasion.

Italy has already pushed ahead with various policies aimed at encouraging people to use electronic payments rather than cash, including a 'receipt lottery', and with tax breaks on eco-friendly renovation projects.

Conte has however faced criticism for not allocating enough money for projects addressing long-term structural issues.

Conte will on Friday meet to discuss the revised proposals with representatives of government coalition partners Italia Viva, the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).

The leader of the small but pivotal Italia Viva party, former premier Matteo Renzi, has threatened to pull out of the ruling coalition over this and other issues, risking its collapse.

Reflecting the strain on the country's economy and public finances from the pandemic, Italy's public deficit reached 9.4 percent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2020, the national statistics agency Istat said Friday – up from 2.2 percent in the same period in 2019.

 

For the year 2020 as a whole, the government forecasts the deficit  – the shortfall between spending and revenue – will be 10.8 percent of GDP, against 1.6 percent in 2019.

The additional spending is expected to boost GDP by three percentage points.

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POLITICS

Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

The year 2024 is a bumper one for elections, among them the European elections in June. Italy is of course a member of the EU - so can foreign residents vote in the elections that will almost certainly affect their daily lives?

Published: 3 May 2024 15:25 CEST
Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

Across Europe, people will go to the polls in early June to select their representatives in the European Parliament, with 76 seats up for grabs in Italy. 

Although European elections usually see a much lower turnout than national elections, they are still seen as important by Italian politicians.

Giorgia Meloni will stand as a candidate this year, hoping use her personal popularity to give her Brothers of Italy party a boost and build on her success in Italy to “send the left into opposition” at the European level too.

When to vote

Across Italy, polling takes place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th June 2024.

Polling stations will be set up in the same places as for national and local elections – usually town halls, leisure centres and other public buildings.

You have to vote at the polling station for the municipality in which you are registered as a resident, which should be indicated on your electoral card.

Polling stations open at 8am and mostly close at 6pm, although some stay open later.

Unlike in presidential or local elections, there is only a single round of voting in European elections.

Who can vote? 

Italian citizens – including dual nationals – can vote in European elections, even if they don’t live in Italy. As is common for Italian domestic elections, polling booths will be set up in Italian consulates around the world to allow Italians living overseas to vote.

Non-Italian citizens who are living in Italy can only vote if they have citizenship of an EU country. So for example Irish citizens living in Italy can vote in European elections but Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. cannot.

Brits in Italy used to be able to vote before Brexit, but now cannot – even if they have the post-Brexit carta di soggiorno.

If you have previously voted in an election in Italy – either local or European – you should still be on the electoral roll.

If not, in order to vote you need to send an application more than 90 days before the election date.

How does the election work?

The system for European elections differs from most countries’ domestic polls. MEPs are elected once every five years.

Each country is given an allocation of MEPs roughly based on population size. At present there are 705 MEPs: Germany – the country in the bloc with the largest population – has the most while the smallest number belong to Malta with just six.

Italy, like most of its EU neighbours, elects its MEPs through direct proportional representation via the ‘list’ system, so that parties gain the number of MEPs equivalent to their share of the overall vote.

So, for example, if Meloni’s party won 50 percent of the vote they would get 38 out of the total of 76 Italian seats.

Exactly who gets to be an MEP is decided in advance by the parties who publish their candidate lists in priority order. So let’s say that Meloni’s party does get that 50 percent of the vote – then the people named from 1 to 38 on their list get to be MEPs, and the people lower down on the list do not, unless a candidate (for example, Meloni) declines the seat and passes it on to the next person on the list.

In the run up to the election, the parties decide on who will be their lead candidates and these people will almost certainly be elected (though Meloni would almost definitely not take up her seat as an MEP, as this would mean resigning from office in Italy).

The further down the list a name appears, the less likely that person is to be heading to parliament.

Once in parliament, parties usually seek to maximise their influence by joining one of the ‘blocks’ made up of parties from neighbouring countries that broadly share their interests and values eg centre-left, far-right, green.

The parliament alternates between Strasbourg and Brussels. 

Find out more about voting in the European elections from Italy on the European Parliament’s website or the Italian interior ministry’s website.

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