There are good reasons for the silent revolt of businesses against the government

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Giorgia Meloni has not noticed, and is partly justified by the many international commitments, the endless tensions that are recorded around the world, the complicated relationships with her international partners, but in recent months, in the face of her government's action, an invisible enemy has gradually taken shape, so to speak, whose profile does not coincide with that of the external opposition or that of the internal opposition . The invisible enemy, being invisible, is silent, does not attack, does not hurt, does not aggress. But the invisible enemy, despite being invisible, has been sending signals to the government for months, most of the time ignored. Who is this invisible enemy? Simple: businesses. Or better yet: entrepreneurs. The invisible enemy has been moving for months with discretion, as well as with concern, and contrary to what one might believe, the government is not frightened by Trump's aggressive policy on tariffs, nor by Europe's slowness and Italy's embarrassment. The invisible enemy knows, deep down, that Italian companies are stronger than the duties and knows that the punitive will of the American president with respect to European exports is directly proportional to the degree of quality of the products threatened by the duties, and there are many Italian ones. The invisible enemy, obviously, is worried about the uncertainty, about industrial production that has been struggling for many months, too many, and is worried about how a crisis of confidence on the part of Italians could also be transferred to consumers , even if Italians, when it comes to economic data, have been giving positive surprises quarter after quarter for years. The fears of the invisible enemy, in truth, are different and coincide with a theme that seems to totally escape the government leaders: not being understood.

Giorgia Meloni's narrative, in recent months, with respect to economic issues, has settled on a precise wavelength, which roughly goes like this. Italy, despite the pessimists, has flattering economic data in front of it. The stock market is doing well, the spread is falling, employment is improving, unemployment is not a concern, inflation is returning below the warning levels, foreign direct investments in Italy are better than those in France, GDP is growing little but is growing more than expected and exports, despite everything, are improving year after year. Not everything is going well - this is the common thread of Meloni's narrative - but things are going well enough not to cause concern when the government finds itself opening the file "how things are going in the Italian economy". All right. But at the same time all wrong. The invisible enemy of the government knows the listed data well. He knows how important it is to have a stable, generally reliable country. And he knows what it means not to have to worry about the fundamentals, as was the case for example with the yellow-green government.

But the presence of a good starting economic condition, contrary to what Meloni claims, represents in the eyes of businesses one more reason not to be satisfied (euphemism) with the government's action. On industrial policies, of course, but not only. Claiming prudence, the reasoning goes, could have made sense in the first months of the experience at Palazzo Chigi. Today, when there are no real obstacles in front of the executive, from an internal point of view, such as to make it impossible to support the activity of businesses, the justifications simply do not exist. The novelty of the under-the-radar claims that arrive, without being listened to, in front of Meloni is that the entrepreneurs who talk to the prime minister, and with the competent ministers, try to stay away from the politics of whining and try to focus on three issues that have totally evaded the government: taxes, bureaucracy, attractiveness. On these points, the comment of entrepreneurs, from the right and the left, is unfortunately unanimous: a half-disaster. And a disaster aggravated by the presence of a non-emergency situation, which could make it easier for the government to work to provide support to businesses. Businesses are accusing the government of being incomprehensibly slow on the issue of cutting red tape, and some entrepreneurs, incredulous at the government's inaction on this front, are even evoking the Portuguese model, where a single digital counter was created for all business practices (licenses, hiring, taxes) with a response within ten days. They are accusing the government of having managed in a disastrous way, as Giorgia Meloni herself admitted at the last Confindustria assembly, the management of some theoretically important incentives, such as the Transition 4.0 plan, the structure of which was characterized by fragmentation in the provisions, delays in the implementing decrees, and indiscriminate incentives with no orientation towards primary sectors (Italy, according to the Desi 2024 index, Digital Economy and Society Index, continues to be 23rd out of 27 in Europe for the integration of digital technologies in businesses).

They blame the government for insufficient action on the issue of taxes, and the famous Ires premiale, or the Ires rate reduced from 24 percent to 15 percent for profits reinvested in hiring or capital goods, despite being in force for 2025 has not yet been defined, and no company has been able to benefit from it, and six months of delay is not a small amount. They blame the government for an almost total inability to act on the tax wedge, on the difference between the cost for the company and the net cost for the worker, and with resignation entrepreneurs often recall that in Spain the wedge is 6 points lower than in Italy (about 39 percent against over 45 percent). They also criticize the government for being too slow in coming up with concrete and urgent solutions to help entrepreneurs find creative solutions to intervene on the cost of energy and although there is a widespread desire to find a solution with the electricity companies ( read Stefano Cingolani today in Il Foglio ) the problem remains and seems far from being solved (on average, an Italian company pays about 15 percent more for electricity than a European company of the same size). And the same proposals for zero-cost reforms, eighty proposals, sent by the business union, Confindustria, to the government were rejected with losses (seven proposals evaluated out of eighty received). Having reached this point in the reasoning, often, when talking about relationships between companies, entrepreneurs, and the government, the name of Minister Adolfo Urso is often mentioned. But placing the blame on a minister, for a problem that concerns the government, is a rhetorical exercise that closely resembles an attempt to find a scapegoat.

The problem, many entrepreneurs are starting to think, concerns the heart of the government, concerns the presidency of the Council, and concerns the difficulty with which Meloni manages to get into the heads of those who do business. And in this difficulty there is a series of problems that cascade. The terrible relationship that Meloni has with Milan, a city that in practically three years of government has received visits from the prime minister only on special occasions. The almost total absence of time dedicated by the prime minister to a relationship with entrepreneurs that is not limited to the relationship with those who represent the entrepreneurs, and here too the few visits made in recent years to Italian production sites weigh and stand out in the prime minister's agenda. The difficulty or rather the embarrassment shown by every government representative every time some interlocutor asks whether in addition to the low spread, great news, there is some action on the part of the government aimed at making Italy more attractive (usual response: we are working on it, we will see later, at the moment nothing new on the agenda).

Giorgia Meloni , a few days ago, almost as if she wanted to exorcise the issue, during a meeting with Amazon Italy used the following words. “Building a long-term development policy also means working to create the conditions so that more and more companies and more and more investors choose our country to produce, create jobs, generate well-being. In other words, the message we intend to send to Europe and the world is as simple as it is powerful: 'Make in Italy'. In other words: choose Italy, because the economy is solid and resilient, there is a favorable environment for investment and you can count on a first-rate industrial and manufacturing system, which creates added value and multiplies opportunities”. With words we are there, with facts less so . And if one day Meloni were to ask herself what is not working in her government, rather than looking for some responsible minister or some unruly ally, she should ask herself what the government has done to “create the conditions so that more and more companies and more and more investors choose our country to produce, create jobs, generate well-being”. The answers, unfortunately, would be very disappointing.

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