The results in the campaign on the roof at the price of gas. The push for a financing mechanism for European defense, digital transition and reconstruction
The search for a concrete way on a ceiling on the price of gas it strengthens. Enter the conclusions of the summit that opens today. A price cap on Russian gas, albeit temporary, despite the doubts of the European regulatory authority, a battle that Mario Draghi and the Italian government first waged in Europe. There is a risk that they are just words, that a text will not be followed by effective decisionsas so often happens in Brussels, but in any case a step forward and our diplomacy registers a cautious satisfaction.
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Also on the food crisis and the Ukrainian grain freeze the dossier has now taken on larger dimensions than those on which Draghi began working a few weeks ago. And the Italian insistence it certainly preceded the international and European attention that is now being devoted to the problem. The direct involvement of Turkey, the phone calls to Putin, after that of the Prime Minister, of Macron and Scholz, say that the problem will now have a negotiated management coordinated also by the Commission.
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But if some dossiers make progress, many others remain at stake, including the sixth package of sanctions on which there is still no agreement. All leaders know that this Council will ultimately serve to deepen the main issues on the table in view of the new European summit at the end of the month, but if the food crisis and the price cap have dimensions that can be defined in the short or medium term, we these are issues that, for the premier, have a long-term but no less urgent framework. In a nutshell, the question that the head of the Italian government will ask his colleagues today, perfectly in line with Macron, the one he has already been working on for some time: where to find, and with what mechanisms, the necessary funds for the challenges on which the geopolitical future of the Union depends.
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European defense, completion of the digital and green transition until 2030, reconstruction of Ukraine, reconstruction of the arms stocks that have gone to Kiev in recent months: hundreds and hundreds of billions of euros are needed and the order of objectives is also interchangeable, but when Draghi, as well as the tenant of the Elysée, argues that it is necessary to decide quickly how to find financing mechanisms, he faces very sensitive issues, which still see on opposite sides the so-called frugal countries of the North on the one hand and those with less solid public accounts, like ours.
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With national budgets alone, the Union cannot be redesigned, the conviction of the Prime Minister. It is necessary to take as a model and replicate the mechanisms of Next Generation Eu, that recovery plan from Covid which has some strengths in the capillarity of its objectives and in a very close control of the Commission. In addition to setting a precedent on the subject that for years has distanced our country from Berlin: the issuance of common debtwith the European Union budget as a guarantee.
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For Draghi a replicable model, perhaps the only possible way if you really want to have a say in the reconstruction and future of Ukraine, as well as on the other files. If everything must be done to unblock Ukrainian ports and put an end to the war, everything must also be done – seen from Palazzo Chigi – to reshape the European Union on a geopolitical and financial perspective different from the current one.
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May 29, 2022 (change May 29, 2022 | 22:35)
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