President Meloni’s press point at the special European Council meeting of 6 March

Introduction by President Meloni 

As you know, today’s discussion has so far mainly focused on defence issues, based on the letter sent by the President of the European Commission, which opens up to some proposals regarding the implementation of resources for defence. This is obviously an informal European Council meeting, so it is not a European Council meeting that makes decisions; it is a European Council meeting to begin discussing a number of proposals that are being put forward, and then decisions will be taken starting from the next, formal European Council meeting.

With regard to Ursula von der Leyen’s proposals, we certainly welcomed the fact that a proposal Italy had been making for a long time has been taken onboard, and that is to deduct defence spending from the calculation of the deficit-to-GDP ratio. President von der Leyen has also outlined additional possibilities to access loans worth EUR 150 billion; this is another possibility, although one of the concerns Italy has raised is that the majority of these resources in some way relate to debt.

When nations like ours approach the subject of debt, there are clearly risks that need to be taken into consideration. I think, for example – and we are working on this proposal, which Minister [of Economy and Finance] Giorgetti will take to the next Ecofin meeting -, that we need to envision European guarantee instruments for private investments, along the lines of InvestEU for instance. We are therefore making proposals so that resources can also be found to encourage investments and therefore also create jobs and help companies, with European guarantees for those investments.

Moving on, we have fought for cohesion funds to be excluded, in other words to exclude the possibility that cohesion funds may be forcibly diverted to defence spending. A clause has remained whereby nations can voluntarily make that choice; we clearly cannot prevent other nations, especially the most vulnerable, from making such a decision, but as far as I am concerned I will propose to Parliament to immediately clarify that Italy does not intend to divert cohesion funds, which are very important for us, for the purchase of weapons, and this will of course be a decision we will make together with Parliament. This is certainly the proposal I will be putting forward.

Moving on, I also pointed out that the concept of defence in Europe is somewhat broader than the word ‘rearmament’. I do not think rearmament is the right word to talk about what we are doing. Today, the concepts of security and defence regard very many domains of citizens’ daily lives and so it is not simply about being adequately armed, although this is certainly an issue; it also concerns the issues of raw materials, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and very many domains which we also have to deal with on a daily basis.

We are therefore perhaps sending messages to citizens that are not very clear, and I think that in this regard we need to clarify, together, what we are doing.

Discussions on Ukraine will continue this evening, but this was mainly what we have talked about today. I also welcome the fact that, following the President of the Commission’s proposal to open up to the exclusion of defence spending from the deficit-to-GDP ratio calculation, a debate is also beginning to emerge on an overall revision of the Stability and Growth Pact. If some of the things we said when the new Pact was launched had been listened to a little more at the time, then we would probably not be facing this situation today, but we certainly welcome this news.

As I see it, a possible revision of the Pact does not concern only the issue of defence; it concerns above all the matter of competitiveness, i.e., strategic autonomy, which regards many areas that, as you know, will be discussed at the next European Council meeting.

I’ll stop here if you have any questions.

[Courtesy translation]