Def and budget variance, what happened
Facts and comments on the parliamentary incident on Thursday 27 April. The deepening of Giuseppe Liturri
The parliamentary incident of Thursday 27 April, when the majority – albeit with 195 votes in favor – failed to reach the required quorum of 201 votes representing the absolute majority of the Chamber, deserves further study.
In the first instance, the organizational deficiency of the parliamentary groups of the majority should be noted, which could not have failed to know that, due to a budget variance, a 2012 law (which implements the principle of balanced budget inserted in the Constitution a few months earlier) provides for a majority strengthened, that is to say the absolute one of the members of the House and the Senate (including life senators), and not the simple one of those present.
The group leaders and deputies could not fail to know this principle above all for a very specific reason. In the past legislature (XVIII) it happened to him 12 times to vote that type of resolution in which the government requests an authorization to deviate and the Chambers authorize it. In this legislature, there had already been a vote on an authorization to deviate on November 9th. This resolution is not always accompanied by the vote on the resolution accompanying the Def or the Nadef which instead is voted by simple majority.
They are two different things that often, but not always, travel together.
NEWSPAPER DEF, OFFSET AND INACCURACIES
Instead we have heard and read about everything and more. "Def, the majority goes down by six votes" headlined Il Sole 24 Ore . Nothing more imprecise. The Def (like the Nadef) is not voted on but, as mentioned, is the subject of a resolution which generally follows the one on the authorization to override. But even here you have to be careful. The Def and the Nadef are often an opportunity to take stock of the trend of the public finances and therefore present corrective measures with respect to the system launched with the budget law for the year. But that's not always the case. In the past legislature, the 2019 DEF of the Conte 1 government was not accompanied by any request for deviation. Conversely, the Conte 2 government, to deal with the damage of the lockdown, resorted to it 6 times, therefore also not coinciding with Def and Nadef.
Said of the disorganization of the majority and the sloppiness with which the newspapers have treated the issue, another aspect must however be underlined. The 13 previous deviation votes have seen only in 4 cases a narrow margin beyond the required majority. In the other 9 cases (Conte 2, Draghi and Meloni governments) there was almost unanimity, as can be seen in the table which, for simplicity, shows only the data of the Senate. The decision of the variegated minority not to merge their votes with those of the majority is therefore surprising, as has often happened in the past, regardless of who was in the majority. Moreover, that budget variance served to put a few tens of euros more in the paycheck, a theme (once) dear to the left. To express a political position, the resolution on the DEF would have been sufficient and advanced. Instead, no to everything.
A “BEAUTIFUL LESSON”
A no that did not fail to arouse the perplexities of Professor Francesco Clementi who, in the Sole 24 Ore , defined what happened as a "good lesson", because "it affirms a method between political forces, that is to say dialogue: learning to distinguish – as he wrote in this newspaper, already in 2017, the then President of the Senate Budget Commission, Giorgio Tonini – between what requires dialogue and political convergence, as is the budget variance that defines the amount of debt that we intend to do as a whole country , from what determines a physiological political dialectic, as is instead the Document of Economics and Finance (Def), which precisely indicates the economic choices of a political majority. Let's really start over then. In all senses."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/governo-meloni-def-cosa-e-successo/ on Tue, 02 May 2023 13:59:38 +0000.