Politico: Italy’s high-speed railway dilemma

“It is necessary to go ahead with the TAV, not go back,” said Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, leader of the League. Although the party has indicated in recent days that the project could be scaled back. “The most reasonable thing is to downsize,” said Giancarlo Giorgetti, undersecretary to the prime minister and a key League figure, on Sunday.

The issue became even more fraught for the 5Stars after the Genoa bridge collapse that killed 43 people. Part of the movement’s early appeal was its opposition to infrastructure projects, including a new highway in Genoa — and it is now paying the political price. Its earlier dismissal of warnings that the bridge was fragile as a “children’s tale” has now been scrubbed from the party website (screenshot here). [...]

The 5Stars are now hedging their earlier opposition. Toninelli has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis before he makes a decision. Deputy Prime Minister (and 5Stars leader) Luigi Di Maio promised to “rethink” the project and to renegotiate the terms with Paris. [...]

The 270-km rail line is supposed to be completed by 2030. It includes an €8.6 billion, 57-kilometer tunnel running under the Alps, and is part of the EU’s Mediterranean transport corridor. The goal is to shift some of the truck traffic running between France and Italy onto rail, which would help reduce EU reliance on oil imports and cut emissions from transport.

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Politico: Juncker attacks ‘part-time Europeans’ among EU governments

He said the EU’s next long-term budget is “not a neutral accounting exercise” and “has to mirror great ambitions and European solidarity” — despite the constraints of Brexit, which the Commission estimates will blow a hole of between €12 billion and €13 billion a year in the EU’s accounts. [...]

“I discovered during the migration crisis, and also during the economic and financial crisis, that there are full-time Europeans who are always there when the necessary measure of Europe is required. And then I discovered that there are part-time Europeans who sometimes take part, who sometimes don’t come to work but who make a lot of speeches,” Juncker said in his speech. [...]

At the same conference, Corina Creţu, the European commissioner for regional policy, warned that thousands of EU-funded projects will be at risk if there are delays to agreeing the next EU budget, which the Commission wants finalized by the European Parliament election in May 2019.

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Politico: Italy can’t get no respect

“The French think of Italy either when they have problems with Germany, or when Italy has an election that could spell trouble,” said Marc Lazar, professor of history and political sociology at Paris’ Sciences-Po university and president of the school of government at LUISS in Rome. [...]

As the crisis rolled into 2012, Monti briefly gained traction and Italy enjoyed a rare moment of EU influence, as the prime minister bounced Angela Merkel into embracing plans for a European banking union, easier access to the eurozone’s bailout fund and the possibility for the rescue fund to aid troubled banks directly. [...]

With a population size close to that of Britain and France, Italy has long punched below its weight in the EU, chiefly because of a chronically unstable political system with frequently changing governments and a weak public administration. The vicious circle of neglect fuels instability and Euroskepticism, which in turn makes it easier to ignore Italy. [...]

Italians have never held so mamy senior positions in European institutions, with four of the 33 seats around the EU summit table: Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni plus Draghi, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. [...]

And Macron has moved to repair ties with Rome. He settled the shipyard dispute with a mutually accepted deal and promised a bilateral treaty to build Franco-Italian cooperation along the lines of the 1963 Elysée treaty that governs the Franco-German partnership.

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Politico: Tajani wants to turn European Parliament into a global stage

Accepted practice at present is that only heads of state can be invited by the president to speak to MEPs at the full session of Parliament in Strasbourg. But recently, MEPs have begun to bend their own unwritten rules and have allowed religious leaders and prime ministers such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to come and speak to MEPs. [...]

Tajani wants to encourage this trend and expand the group of people permitted to speak and debate with MEPs to include EU leaders such as Council President Donald Tusk or European Central Bank President Mario Draghi — in effect turning the Parliament into “the center of the debate” on the future of Europe, according to a document obtained by POLITICO. Crucially, he also wants MEPs to be able to quiz their guest speakers rather than just listening passively.  [...]

According to other documents obtained by POLITICO, Tajani’s conservative European People’s Party and the Greens group proposed in a recent meeting of the Conference of Presidents (the Parliament’s decision-making body) to invite Jerry Brown, the governor of California, to speak and debate with MEPs. [...]

MEPs have come in for criticism for not turning up in sufficient numbers when the Parliament has had high-profile speakers. In July, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called the Parliament “ridiculous” because the hemicycle was close to empty during a speech by Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

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Politico: Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘The Parliament is ridiculous’

But EU leaders have been working extremely hard in recent months to maintain a high level of unity as they confront the twin challenges of Brexit and a wave of right-wing populism — and they have largely seemed to be succeeding. Pro-European candidates have emerged victorious in a string of elections, including in the Netherlands and France, and the EU has seemed to take the upper hand in the early stages of negotiations with the U.K.

But Juncker’s fury over the the fact that perhaps just 30 of the 751 MEPs managed to attend the plenary for the speech by Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat apparently overwhelmed his normal efforts to portray the bloc as working in tight cohesion for the benefit of European citizens. [...]

Among the punctual MEPs present to hear Juncker and Muscat speak were: the president of the Greens group, Philippe Lamberts, who is Belgian; Tanja Fajon, a Socialist from Slovenia; and David Casa, a Maltese member of EPP. [...]

Juncker, who is a former prime minister of Luxembourg, had said earlier that he believed the absence of MEPs was a clear sign of disrespect to Malta, the smallest EU country. He added that if German Chancellor Angela Merkel or French President Emmanuel Macron had been giving a speech instead, “We would have a full house.”

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