Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi brushed off suggestions of tensions with the EU yesterday after newspapers accused senior officials of smirking at a news conference when asked if Rome may be granted extra flexibility on its budget targets.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy told journalists in Brussels that all countries would have to respect their budget commitments.
They appeared to laugh slightly when asked if there could be room for Italy to fund growth-creation measures through deficit spending, prompting angry accusations in the Italian press that they were mocking the suggestion.
“I found the reports quite far from reality,” Renzi told reporters after an EU council meeting, saying that Italy met all its commitments and was not asking for favours.
Barroso and Van Rompuy smile when asked about Italy’s budget
“This submissive, supine attitude, saying that you are coming cap in hand to Brussels is something I will never have,” he said, adding that governments had to restore recession-weary citizens’ confidence in European institutions.
However, the reaction in Italy reflected questions over how well Renzi’s fast-talking style and his promises to end the austerity policies that have dominated the EU’s response to the eurozone debt crisis will go down in Brussels.
The controversy overshadowed reassuring messages from the summit about Renzi’s economic reform agenda, which includes promises of sweeping tax cuts and spending programmes to boost growth but has raised doubts over how they will be funded.
“No, those smiles will not do at all,” the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most influential daily, said in a front page editorial, echoed in other papers. “They are a gratuitous slap in the face. An offence that Italy does not deserve.”
Van Rompuy’s spokesman Dirk De Backer dismissed the controversy and the coverage by Italy’s press.
“It’s a deliberate misinterpreting of a smile. Van Rompuy and Barroso only wanted to coordinate on who had to answer to the journalist.
“The stories in the press do not deserve further comment,” he said.
Renzi has promised that Italy, struggling to emerge from its longest post-war recession, with unemployment at record levels, will meet its budget commitments, including keeping its deficit under the EU cap of three per cent of gross domestic product.
However, he has pledged measures including €10 billion in income tax cuts to low earners, swift repayment of tens of billions of euros in debt arrears owed by the public sector to private companies and heavy investment in schools, all to be funded by extra borrowing and so-far undefined spending cuts.