A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #33-25 - Coming War Spending. Budget and War Economy (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The day of action on November 28th is particularly significant if we 
consider it within the movement against the war economy. The budget 
presented by the Italian government and currently under discussion in 
Parliament is an important but not decisive step in this direction. The 
increase in military spending envisaged in the budget is estimated at 
38.5% compared to 2024; investments (net of personnel expenditure) 
amount to EUR9.197 billion, up from EUR7.503 billion in 2024, a 23% 
increase compared to 2023. This is a significant increase, but it still 
doesn't provide a measure of what awaits us in the coming months.

The government's primary goal with this measure currently under 
discussion is to exit the infringement procedure opened by the European 
Commission against Italy for excessive deficit. The most important 
meeting is scheduled for April: the government will appear in Brussels 
with a deficit below the 3% limit set by the Maastricht Treaty, and that 
chapter should be closed.

Exiting this infringement procedure will allow the government to access 
SAFE funds and finance the increase in defense spending with debt. 
Meanwhile, the government has written a letter to the European 
Commission reserving EUR15 billion of the EUR150 billion available, a 
procedure beyond any parliamentary oversight.

SAFE is the second and smallest pillar of the ReArmEu plan, later 
renamed Readiness 2030; it is a loan program to finance the defense 
industry that the European Commission launched last March. Italy has 
decided to reserve part of these funds, along with 17 other European 
Union member states.

Safe, meaning Security Action For Europe, draws on the architecture of 
the SURE plans, adopted in 2020 to support the incomes of workers 
affected by the production shutdown, and the NextGenerationEU plan for 
businesses, decided by governments following the Covid pandemic. This is 
yet another example of the use-for the militarization of society-of 
measures introduced under the guise of the health emergency. In this 
case, it involves the European Commission's ability to operate on the 
financial markets through bonds guaranteed by the margin of maneuver, 
that is, the difference between the own resources ceiling (the maximum 
revenue the EU can generate) and actual expenditure. The European 
Commission has the option of increasing the own resources ceiling for a 
short time to cover unexpected expenses. The buzz surrounding the 
short-term Russian threat serves the purpose of fueling an emergency 
situation that justifies increasing that ceiling.

In this way, the European Commission directs the economic and industrial 
policies of EU member states, influencing national parliaments, already 
constrained by the rules of the Stability Pact, with debt incurred by 
the Commission but repaid, directly or indirectly, by the citizens of 
the member states.

The budget currently under discussion does not curb the trend of 
increasingly removing economic matters from public debate and the 
control of individual parliaments, concentrating them in the hands of 
the European bureaucracy. Most of the burdens are not included in the 
current budget, neither the borrowing nor the increased defense spending 
that will be decided at the NATO summit in June.

The real budget will then be presented, and that will be the decisive 
step towards halting the rearmament policy. These are issues that must 
be kept in mind when discussing a war economy. In this scenario, 
November 28th is a step towards building an international antimilitarist 
movement capable of halting this policy.

Policarpo

https://umanitanova.org/la-spesa-bellica-che-verra-finanziaria-ed-economia-di-guerra/
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