Meloni and the ‘over-inflated’. She fears the spread and inflation. Giorgetti: ‘I won’t print money’. Urso’s humanoids

Inflation risks becoming the left’s ‘third man’. Forget the name Giuseppe Conte is subtly hinting at – ‘his’ Roberto Gualtieri – or Franco Gabrielli, the ‘white-flower’ policeman, who is stepping into the fray and forming a ‘plus one’ alliance with Ruffini. The ominous words are returning – ‘inflation’, ‘spread’ – which frighten Meloni and Giorgetti and unsettle the stock exchanges and markets. Listen to Giorgetti, at a press conference following the Council of Ministers meeting that approved the DPFB, with the request for a deviation and the use of the safeguard clause – the NEC for energy and defence (0.3 per cent for energy and 0.3 per cent for defence): “We are approving the Dpfb (the Public Finance Policy Document) in a complex context, where making forecasts is becoming increasingly difficult. I won’t hide from you the close attention with which we are monitoring trends in inflation and interest rates.” For once at least – and that’s some consolation – it is European instability that is undermining Italian stability.

ECB President Lagarde may step down, so much so that Giorgetti is urging her to provide “clarity” – and soon. Meloni’s request to the EU to devise new instruments, beyond the NEC, to avert the great scourge of inflation, will be brought before the next Ecofin meeting on 9 October – an Ecofin meeting at which Giorgetti now sits as a ‘veteran’ minister. When asked what he intends to propose, Giorgetti replies that “the discussion must be realistic and not academic, based on the rules”. Only those who have lived through the ‘spread’ crisis and the Greek nightmare (which is not our case, but only because of the order maintained in our accounts over recent years) understand what happens to Italy, with its debt, when inflation rises, the spread widens and interest rates soar. Meloni and Giorgetti keep repeating that there is no room for electoral folly. Giorgetti has a favourite retort he uses to disarm the nation’s inflationists and those who have lost touch with reality – the spending savages: “I don’t print money. Do you understand?”

On Thursday evening, when it was decided that defence spending would have to be slashed – asking the EU for just 0.3 per cent – Crosetto, gritting his teeth, replied to Meloni: “I understand and I accept that”. These are the very same words Crosetto used yesterday as well, with his terse “I have taken note of this and I hope that conditions in 2027 will allow for a subsequent increase”. It was Meloni who explained to Crosetto that it was impossible even to imagine allocating further resources to defence, but Crosetto is equally right when he argues that, in this world of drones, those resources “are investments”, and that giving them up today means falling behind the times. Previously, it was energy that was causing Meloni concern – the high cost of fuel, which she managed to keep in check with Eni’s help – but now the decline in reserves has also become an issue, which was the subject of an extraordinary G7 summit.

These are exceptional times and, for Giorgetti, they call for swift action rather than ‘that sort of academic talk’, because, as Giorgetti goes on to explain, ‘the expenditure path and the targets set for individual countries three years ago, when the inflation rate was different, cannot fail to take into account the different impact that inflation has had on the nominal expenditure path’. There is even room for gentle irony from this minister, reminiscent of Piero Chiara from the lakeside, with his remark: “I believe anyone with even a modicum of expertise in the matter will understand the complaint.” We teased them when they were celebrating the “longest-serving government”, yet there was something behind the survivors’ smiles. It is the ‘job’ that is turning their hair grey and that has made them – not all of them, but a good many – so shrewd. Adolfo Urso, who still hasn’t grasped how to behave at the table with Meloni, suggested during the Council of Ministers meeting that we should copyright our humanoids because the Chinese ‘come to Italy, into our laboratories, and copy us’. At that point, Meloni is said to have snatched the microphone from him and reminded him: this issue does need some thought, but don’t you dare do that “without asking me first”.

No sooner had the Deputy Minister for Labour, Bellucci, outlined the national plan for the elderly and grandparents than Meloni and her supporters scoffed, and the chorus of “we’ve grown old” began. They have also grown old when it comes to finding a solution, to knowing how to raise awareness amongst the public without evoking proletarian expropriations and burning rubbish bins. They have grown old and worn out, whilst Schlein and Conte spend their days squabbling over old slogans: ‘One is worth one’. Each recalls different moments: Giorgetti and Meloni remember 2011 and draw strength from that period of crisis, from those ‘dark and taciturn’ hours. Conte and Schlein recall the years of ‘fuck you’ and ruined accounts. Inflation affects even memories.