Ode to the NRRP: the real budget manoeuvre that taught us the virtues of external constraints

What if the real manoeuvre were something else entirely? This article stems from a daring and ambitious idea that coincides with a necessary yet difficult-to-achieve objective. The idea is to take an acronym that has become very famous in recent years – a four-letter acronym that enjoyed a successful phase, followed by a promising phase, then a disheartening phase, and which today, mired in the toxic quagmire of daily whingeing, has become synonymous with inefficiency, wasted time, missed opportunities and money down the drain. The acronym we are referring to is the one you have by now come to know – PNRR, even though some ministers, after four years of PNRR, continue to refer to it with one letter missing, PNR, as if there were a desire to utter that acronym as little as possible – and that acronym, having been so badly mangled, finally deserves a bit of justice, especially in a season of minimal manoeuvres. PNRR, as you know, stands for National Recovery and Resilience Plan. For us, however, today the PNRR could stand for something different, which we might acrobatically summarise as follows: Non-Confrontational Policies Pay Off.

To do justice to the NRRP means lifting it out of the valley of complaints that has dogged it for months and placing it in a different context, within which – six years after its creation – it is possible to take stock not timidly but with genuine enthusiasm. The PNRR (with two ‘r’s) not only had the merit of offering Italy a sense of direction during a difficult period (Covid), but also helped bring to our country the most significant Europeanisation drive ever seen since the euro came into force. The PNRR has become famous for the money it helped put into circulation in Italy – around 196 billion. Some of the PNRR funds have remained in the coffers – between ten and twelve billion: this is money saved thanks to tendering processes which, when carried out properly, allow the state to spend slightly less than budgeted, and you can bet that between now and the elections, those billions will be pulled out of the hat. Yet the real merit of the PNRR – which has shaped our country’s course in recent years more than any budget – was not that it showered Italy with money. The real merit lay elsewhere. It was in revealing, during this potentially perilous period, the true face of Europe – where ‘true face’ means a blend of integration, solidarity, support, reforms and results. The NRRP led Europe to issue, on a massive scale, something akin to a common debt, and seeing fiscally disciplined European countries allow less disciplined ones to benefit from shared resources was a decisive step in the history of our continent. But the NRRP has also had other effects for Italy, the longevity of which we cannot yet gauge – that is, whether they will endure even after the NRRP comes to an end – but which are currently right before our eyes. The NRRP has made external constraints less difficult to accept, and the fact that this government’s budgetary measures have focused on fiscal discipline is also a legacy of the NRRP: prudence pays off. Furthermore, the PNRR has prompted Eurosceptic parties to consider the option of seeking funding from Europe in exchange for reforms to be implemented in their own country as a viable one. 

It has forced Italian local authorities to adopt new tools to put those resources to good use. It has forced the state to consider the decentralisation of European resources from the regions as a viable option. It has enabled Italy to remain, in recent years, on the path of pro-Europeanism, despite the presence of governing parties not always at ease with the word ‘Europe’. Finally, it has set an interesting precedent which we have attempted – perhaps somewhat clumsily – to summarise with our acronym: whilst we may hold differing views on Italy’s future, on certain issues it is possible to unite for the good of our country. The NRRP, over which the parties are still arguing today about what has not been done, and what could have been done but was not, was a cross-party political success at the heart of which lie different stories that cannot be ignored. It was a success for the Conte II government to have successfully negotiated the funds secured for Italy. It was to the credit of the Draghi government to have found the strength to refine the plan beyond how its predecessors had originally drawn it up. It was to the Meloni government’s credit that it found a way not to let a single euro go to waste over the past few years, improving the plan where it could be improved, in the knowledge that when the NRRP was approved in 2022, the party now in the majority – Fratelli d’Italia – which was in opposition at the time, did not approve that plan, opting instead to abstain.

There are many stories about the delays to the NRRP, and they are all worth remembering, because once we have received a great deal of money from Europe, it would be wise to actually spend it rather than use it to fund projects that have been gathering dust in drawers for years and have little or nothing to do with innovation in Italy. The reason it is now possible to do the PNRR some justice is linked to the publication of a mammoth tome edited by the former Under-Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Office during Mario Draghi’s tenure, Roberto Garofoli, who has now returned to his role as a judge at the Council of State and has also become the editor of an important report on the state of Italy’s economy, presented by ANCI, the National Association of Italian Municipalities, led by the Mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi. Garofoli presents a wealth of data, offers many insights and provides numerous snapshots. Yet a few key figures can be gleaned from the report – just the essentials – which help us realise that, amidst the doomsday narrative surrounding the NRRP, we may be missing something. We are missing, for one thing, a turning point, brought about precisely by the mechanisms of the NRRP, which has reduced the average planning time in Southern Italy – for projects worth more than 150,000 euros – from 20.4 months to 7.1 months.

We are, for example, overlooking the figures for civil justice, which – partly thanks to the NRRP – have fallen by 34.7 per cent, at least as regards the so-called ‘disposition time’, an indicator based on the ratio of pending cases to resolved cases, which is, of course, different from the actual duration of individual cases. We are also overlooking – still within the justice sector – a significant reduction in the backlog, which has fallen by 46.8 per cent in the courts and by 53.2 per cent at appeal level. We are also overlooking a considerable number of schools that have been made safe, a figure that has exceeded the European target of 1,400: as of 16 April 2026, 1,513 projects had been completed. We are overlooking a 38 per cent improvement in the speed of payments by local authorities, from 42 days to 26. We are missing out on an improvement in renewable energy production, which is not yet as rapid as it should be but which, thanks in part to the NRRP, has accelerated, with annual new renewable installations rising from around 3 GW in 2022 to 7 GW in 2024 and 2025. We have overlooked the number of local authorities that now have a little more digitalisation thanks to the use of the cloud: 96 per cent of local authorities have embarked on a digitalisation programme, whilst 68 per cent report having completed it. We are overlooking the fact that in recent years, during the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) – 40 per cent of which was allocated to the South – southern GDP grew, proportionally, between 2021 and 2024, by more than that of the centre-north: 8.5 per cent compared to 5.8 per cent, partly thanks to the PNRR. Finally, we are also overlooking the significant yet little-reported figure of people aged over 65 receiving home care, which has risen from 645,590 in 2019 to 1,546,443 in 2024.

The more cynical among us will, quite rightly, recall that the NRRP could have been put to much better use, that Italy’s growth forecasts attributable to the NRRP fell short of expectations, and that, ultimately, the NRRP was little more than a fig leaf with which the Meloni government struggled to cover up its failures on the issue of growth. Yet what will actually remain of the PNRR is not that it saved the Meloni government from the embarrassment it might have faced had growth been even lower than we have seen. What will remain is that it offered Italy the opportunity to understand just how beneficial it is to be pro-European, just how dangerous it is to be Eurosceptic, and just how much good it can do the country to have parties that argue about everything but ultimately see eye to eye on the fundamentals. Non-confrontational politics pay off. What if this were the real manoeuvre that matters for Italy? Long live the NRRP.