Emergency summit at Palazzo Chigi and Meloni’s stop: the (narrow) road to remedy Leo’s misstep on the income meter

It happens mid-afternoon, before the meeting on the earthquake shocks in the Campi Flegrei. The prime minister has not yet completely gotten over her anger over it slip of his deputy minister with responsibility for “friendly taxation”, when it ends with Maurizio Leo and his most trusted collaborators in the Palazzo Chigi studio. A summit called urgently, to identify a technical and political way out and try to reverse a narrative that the leader considers disastrous: the no-tax government transformed, due to a (double) timing and communication error, into government that suddenly sticks its hands in the pockets of Italians. A deadly short circuit 18 days before a European vote that your prime minister considers decisive, for her and for Italy.

Tajani and Salvini, the two deputy prime ministers made adversaries by proportional competition find themselves on the same side. Two against one. And they raise their tone, the first contesting “the error” and the other shouting “horror”, to gain consensus from (involuntary) misstep by the FdI leader. And she, who at 10 in the morning hoped to stop the internal controversies and the jubilant cries of the opposition by vowing that “no big fiscal brother will ever be introduced by this government”, understands that it is not enough and decides to put her face to it. Light jacket, serious face, camera in action. The video of the about-face is being shot in the rooms of the Prime Minister’s office.

Explaining that the government has “inherited a very dangerous situation” Meloni locks up Leo’s rickety armchairdespite the fact that behind closed doors I reproached him for not having weighed up in time the political significance of that signature in the Official Journal. He doesn’t point the finger at the deputy minister under accusation, on the contrary he says that they decided, together, that it was “better to suspend the decree pending further investigation”.

For the end of the story we have to wait for tomorrow’s Council of Ministers. Leo, the ash-strewn head, will hold the relation that Meloni imposed on him and will try to justify how it could end up in the Gazzetta a norm of which neither the prime minister nor minister Giorgetti knew anything. And it is easy to imagine the level of embarrassment that such a short circuit triggered between Palazzo Chigi, via XX Settembre and via della Scrofa, headquarters of FdI.

Tomorrow, at the government meetingTajani will put his lapidary amendment on the table: “Repeal”. AND Salvini will reiterate the meaning of the agenda, first signatory Alberto Gusmeroli, with which the League asked its own government to confirm «passing the income meter institute» and to avoid a «disproportionate and vexatious intrusion» into the property data and privacy of Italians. An agenda which, although approved yesterday, within Forza Italia they consider irrelevant, “like a sip of mineral water”.

The problem now is how to get out of it. Because Leo’s move, as much as his government colleagues sacrificed him as the scapegoat, was long overdue and the Court of Auditors had also requested its implementation. Executive sources, also to share the damage caused by the electoral incident with the League, Pd and M5S, circulated a note that reconstructs the normative origins and the path of the revived income meter. Born in 1973, codified as a primary law by the Renzi government in 2015, repealed in 2018 by Conte I, reappeared in 2019 with the establishment of a table at the Mef with the Revenue Agency and Istat «to define a new implementing decree that respects privacy and guarantees the taxpayer” and, finally, landed in the Gazzetta with Leo’s signature.

Everything to do again. To cancel a ministerial decree, it must be repealed the upstream regulations that provide for it, or replace it with a new decree. And this is the solution that is emerging. With a political stake that Meloni would have planted forcefully: until June 9thwoe betide you to evoke anything remotely resembling the «tax big brother».

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May 23, 2024

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