Giorgia Meloni is preparing to convene the task force of ministers tomorrow afternoon to assess, sector by sector, the repercussions of US tariffs on Italian production. There will be Giancarlo Giorgetti (Economy), Adolfo Urso (Business), Francesco Lollobrigida (Agriculture) and Tommaso Foti (European Affairs), in addition to the deputy prime ministers. Then, with Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani, she should have a restricted meeting, in which the subsequent moves could take shape, from protections for the most affected categories to a possible mission to Washington on which, behind the utmost secrecy, diplomatic discussions and assessments of political opportunity are underway.
The summit between the leaders would come in the aftermath of the takeover bid launched by the Lega Nord on the Viminale, greeted by the coldness of FI but especially of FdI. Fibrillations that Meloni glosses over in her video message to the Lega congress, ensuring that "we will continue flat out until the end of the legislature", respecting the "point-by-point program", including the premiership, justice reform and differentiated autonomy. However, a plan B is also circulating in the majority, with early elections (the idea would be an election day with political and regional elections in spring 2026), if tensions, internal and international, were to continue, and the need arose in the future for unpopular measures that would put the government's consensus at risk later on. Which in any case, the prime minister underlines, can "still count on the consensus of the majority of Italians after two and a half years".
The mission to Washington could instead enter the short-term calendar. According to various sources, it could be placed in the first half of Easter week, before the arrival of the American vice president JD Vance in Rome. The White House has reportedly expressed a general willingness to schedule the bilateral meeting with Donald Trump, and for this reason the intergovernmental summit with Turkey has not yet been officially confirmed, scheduled for April 16 and 17. But the trip is being considered in depth . For days, Melonians have been convinced that if the leader flies to the US, it will be to play the role of bridge builder between Washington and Brussels that she has been preaching in recent months. However, this is not necessarily the view of some European partners such as France, Germany and Spain. And in government circles, the issue is being treated with the utmost caution, without hiding the risk of a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office precisely in the days when the EU (on the 15th) will launch countermeasures to duties on steel and aluminum.
Speaking to the audience of the League, which is pushing for bilateral negotiations with Trump, the prime minister defines the government as ready "to deploy all the tools - negotiating and economic - necessary to support our businesses and our sectors that may be penalized". And she draws applause by reiterating that she asks "strongly Europe to review the ideological regulations of the Green Deal and the excess of regulation in every sector, which today constitute real internal duties that would end up senselessly adding to external ones".
Each of the ministers of the task force is preparing a report on the most exposed export segments, avoiding, the executive reasons, "generalist readings" and "alarmism". Tajani will connect from Luxembourg to the meeting (scheduled for 5:30 p.m.), who in the next few hours at the Foreign Affairs Council in Trade format will meet for the fourth time in a few days with the EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. "Let's not panic", the message shared by the president of Confindustria, Emanuele Orsini, according to whom we need to "talk with the United States and it is Europe as a whole that must negotiate", for example "on Big Tech and the purchase of gas".
On Tuesday at Palazzo Chigi, in the meeting with the business categories, the focus will be on internal solutions, with businesses also pushing for the transfer of resources from the Transition Plan 5.0 to development contracts. A review of the resources in the folds of the budget is underway. And the government's pressure, also made explicit by the Minister of Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti, for the suspension or easing of the Stability Pact is considered crucial. A decidedly complex game, but one that, if won, could allow, according to the reasoning widespread in the majority, to carry out interventions in deficit that otherwise would only be possible with a corrective maneuver.
(Online Union)