The Budget as a Self-Portrait ---- Every budget law is, ultimately, a
self-portrait. It reveals what a country believes is possible and whatit deems out of reach. The 2026 budget law does not depict a poor Italy,
but rather a resigned Italy: closing the books before even starting
construction, reducing entitlements to meet the deficit, replacing
politics with administrative management. ---- The very language of the
budget-"net primary expenditure," "European co-financing," "territorial
equalization"-seems written by an auditor, not by a company seeking to
change course. It is the first fully post-NRRP budget, constructed
within the constraints of the new European Stability Pact.
The Court of Auditors puts it with an elegance that does not soften its
judgment: "A law more concerned with accounting than strategy." Indeed,
the document does not open up new horizons, but closes margins: a
deficit reduction to 2.8% in 2026, growth below 1%, healthcare spending
barely adjusted, and declining public investment.
A budget that doesn't plan: it accounts.
The economics of compatibility
Parliamentary hearings on the budget offered a rare portrait of national
unity.
Banks, businesses, professions, moderate unions, cooperatives, and
regions all agree on the principle of austerity. Each is asking for an
exception for themselves-a tax break, an extension, a tax exemption-but
no one questions the general framework.
It's the logic of compatibility: with Europe, with the markets, with
rating agencies. A compatibility that becomes a worldview.
Thus, the budget is no longer a place of social conflict, but of
corporate bargaining.
We're discussing tax rates, not rights; incentives, not services. The
only true redistribution is that of tax benefits. The result is a
fragile and perfect consensus: a country that agrees not to decide, as
long as everyone maintains their own niche.
Numbers that don't make sense
Behind the neutrality of the data, the hearings by ISTAT and the GIMBE
Foundation reveal another truth: Italian society is losing its cohesion.
Absolute poverty affects 8.4% of families-nearly six million people-and
one in seven children. Public healthcare spending falls below 6% of GDP,
about two points less than the European average.
There is a shortage of 65,000 nurses, the number of general
practitioners is decreasing, and the workforce is increasingly aging. In
Southern Italy, municipal social spending is half that of the North:
EUR69 per person versus EUR127. GIMBE estimates that, if things continue
like this, the National Health Fund will have a lower impact on GDP in
2028 than in 2010.
Yet, while healthcare and education are shrinking, the Defense budget is
growing: EUR13 billion in 2026. In the same document, just EUR350
million is listed for hydrogeological instability. These figures are no
longer scandalous because they no longer reflect a system: there is no
longer any sense of balance between spending and priorities.
Politics is limited to ensuring the financial survival of the state, not
its social function (if it ever had one).
The absent climate, the invisible society
In the 2026 budget, the word climate appears only once. Greenpeace has
counted it: one article, EUR350 million for reducing hydrogeological
risks, compared to EUR8.5 billion in damages from the flood in
Emilia-Romagna alone.
In the rest of the text, the climate crisis doesn't exist. The budget
seems to be written by an immobile world, ignoring the earth's fever and
job insecurity, the declining birth rate, educational poverty, and the
desertification of services. The idea of society is replaced by a
geometry of contributions: a revised ISEE, a few bonuses for children, a
hiring incentive.
The family becomes a tax variable, care a cost to be contained, school a
spending item. Even healthcare, once a universal right, is treated as a
productivity issue.
It's the triumph of the accounting of existence.
The voices that resist
There's no shortage of dissenting voices, but they remain marginal.
The CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) speaks of a "drainage
maneuver," which will subtract over thirty billion from wages and
pensions in three years. The Alliance Against Poverty denounces the
halving of beneficiaries of the Inclusion Allowance. The GIMBE
Foundation calls for stable refinancing of public healthcare, while
Greenpeace proposes two extraordinary solidarity contributions: one on
the profits of the military industries, the other on the energy industries.
The Forum of Family Associations, although close to the majority, admits
that measures on the birth rate "are not even enough to slow the
demographic decline."
All, in different ways, describe the same condition: a state that is no
longer capable of being a driver of transformation, but merely a manager
of limits. ISTAT, in the neutral language of tables, sums it up better
than anyone else: the country is older, more unequal, more fragile.
Everyone, in different ways, describes the same condition: a state no
longer capable of being a driver of transformation, but merely a manager
of limitations. ISTAT, in the neutral language of tables, sums it up
better than anyone else: the country is older, more unequal, more
fragile. And yet it seems convinced that there is no alternative.
After the PNRR, the void of meaning
With the end of the extraordinary funding cycle, Italy has returned to
normality: the normality of balanced budgets. The budget law returns to
what it was before the PNRR: an exercise in compression. But in the
meantime, society has lost confidence.
Public employment is exhausted, private healthcare is expanding, schools
are resisting through inertia.
The ecological transition has remained in the lexicon, not in spending.
Digital innovation has left the bureaucracy intact.
The risk, now concrete, is that of a permanent administration of
decline: a state that neither retreats nor advances, that manages the
existing like a loss-making condominium. No longer a crisis, but an
institutionalized stalemate.
Conclusion
"A budget law without a world": this is how one might define the 2026
budget. Not because it ignores reality, but because it reduces it to a
set of accounting columns. Healthcare, education, employment, the
environment, welfare: everything falls within the logic of
compatibility, nothing within that of hope.
The state budget, from a tool of direction, becomes the exact opposite
of what it should be: the snapshot of a country that has stopped
questioning where it wants to go.
A country that doesn't dream, doesn't argue, doesn't take risks. Yet
precisely from here, from this planned aridity, the demand for another
measure of the possible can arise: one that is not calculated in GDP
points, but in rights, cohesion, and the future.
Because a budget, to become political again, must first of all take the
point of view of the least privileged and have collective well-being as
its horizon, not the preservation of privileges.
The robbery of the stagecoach is complete, but the bandits will remain free.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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