Even in the group of sovereignists there are those who compete to see who is the most sovereignist. This time, in the match, there are two exponents of the European far right: on the one hand, there is the number one of the Rassemblement National, on the other the Italian prime minister. Marine Le Pen does not hide her resentment towards Giorgia Meloni due to the enormity of the Pnrr granted to Italy, paid mainly by France, according to the French sovereignist.
“It’s easier with France’s money”
“The thing I envy Giorgia Meloni is the enormity of the recovery plan that has affected Italy and that we, France, will pay for,” she declared on the transalpine public radio station France Inter. To then make matters worse: “I don’t minimize Meloni’s work, but with 240 billion received from the European Union it’s easier.” In short, the Rassemblement National leader – who last March was sentenced to 4 years for misappropriation of EU funds and therefore ineligible for 5 years – is not taking it out directly on her Italian friend, but on the Brussels government.
Conte’s intervention
The controversy, however, was fertile ground for Giuseppe Conte. The leader of the 5 Star Movement underlined in a post on social media how the leader of the French right declared that she “envied” Meloni only one thing: not the measures on security or immigration, nor those on taxes and salaries, but the European funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. “The French right only envies Meloni what Meloni didn’t do. Who knows if Le Pen knows that while my government was fighting to obtain those over 200 billion in Europe, Meloni was calling us criminals in Italy and making the parliamentarians of the Brothers of Italy vote abstention”, he commented. Conte then added that “today in Italy the only construction sites open and the only investments underway are precisely thanks to that money: for schools, roads, kindergartens, healthcare facilities. Without those funds we would be in full recession, with a minus sign (-0.5 percent)”.
What Conte is referring to is the vote from several years ago. In April 2021, when the then Prime Minister Mario Draghi presented the final text of the Pnrr to the Chamber and Senate to be sent to Brussels by the end of the month, Meloni – then an FdI deputy – declared her group’s abstention as follows: “FdI does not accept the method of a Plan deliberately kept locked in a drawer and then presented to Parliament with the take-it-or-leave-it formula”. The M5S leader finally criticized the current management of the Pnrr, claiming that “the funds are spent with enormous delay” and that “the government’s race is only for rearmament”.
