"If we don't develop structural, long-term responses, we risk being left at the mercy of the emergency," Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on the high cost of energy, speaking at the Assolombarda assembly in Milan.

"In recent years," she emphasized, "the government has allocated over 60 billion euros to protect Italians from high energy costs, but this is an emergency response and long-term structural responses are needed ," the Prime Minister emphasized, noting among the measures adopted are the reduction of utility bills, the elimination of the differential between Italian and European gas prices, and tools such as gas release and energy release.

"When tensions in the Middle East and along the Gulf routes caused fuel prices to skyrocket," she continued, "the government intervened by cutting excise duties, mobile excise duties, and abolishing the road tax on some vehicles. It also appealed to the major energy companies to control prices, to which several companies responded positively." In her speech, Meloni also noted that installed capacity from renewables "has grown by almost 40% and that domestic oil and gas production has been relaunched, because it doesn't make much sense to buy them thousands of kilometers away when we can extract part of it in Italy."

Regarding nuclear power, "the necessary conditions have been created to begin a process with an ambitious and necessary goal: to achieve the first energy production from new nuclear power within the next decade, and we will continue to work on it."

On inflation: the geopolitical context fuels " an inflation that is beyond our control, but which weighs heavily on families, production systems, and public finances . Europe cannot ignore this" because "in Italy, as in other countries, a significant portion of spending is automatically adjusted to inflation by law." Minister Giorgetti discussed this issue at the Ecofin meeting a few days ago, and I will personally raise the issue again at the European Council meeting this Thursday and Friday. From our point of view, it is a simple proposal, based on common sense as well as responsibility," because "that additional spending" "occupies the space that European rules allow us and takes it away from everything else: from businesses, from investments, from growth."

"I remind myself, and anyone who cares about this nation, that Italy doesn't sit at the European table to always say yes. It sits there to say what needs to be said when it needs to be said, even if it's inconvenient, even if it costs." This is because "Italy is among the nations that founded Europe and has the right and duty to speak out when something is wrong, not to weaken it, but precisely the opposite: to make it stronger."

(Unioneonline)

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