Il nuovo Patto di stabilità e crescita: aspetti critici e prospettive inquietanti

The reform of the Stability Pact is mainly judged to be inadequate for the geo-political and geo-economic challenges of the post-pandemic era; it does not seem to enhance the democratic nature of budgetary policy coordination procedures either at the European or national level; it does not solve the problem of the pro-cyclicality of public debt consolidation policies, nor that of the guarantee of public investment. These criticisms are consistent with a mainstream reading of the Stability Pact and the rules of the TFEU and Protocol No. 12 on the indebtedness of Member States (i.e., disciplining high-debt States to prevent spillover onto low-debt States, primarily Germany, and deviations from the low-inflation economic model entrusted to an absolutely independent Central Bank). This perspective changes if one accepts a realist reconstruction of the Stability Pact: as showed by the austerity policies adopted to cope with the 2010 crisis, European debt rules did not serve to ameliorate the debt to GDP ratio (which in many cases worsened), but to solve the problem of balance of payments imbalances (endemic to every monetary union) through the coercively alignment of the different national economic models to the apparently successful export-led German model. On another level, the inconsistency of assessing public debt sustainability through indicators that ignore the level of private indebtedness and public assets is only apparent: it turns into coherence if one admits that the Maastricht parameters applied to countries with high public debt and low private indebtedness (such as Italy) serve to shift private savings from government bonds to private securities, favouring oligopolistic private finance (today - as at the launch of the euro - predominantly French). German and French priorities find their balance behind the apparent inconsistencies of the Maastricht construction, as mirrored by the way in which both the 1997 and the 2024 political agreements on the Stability Pact and its last reform were concluded. Such an internal balance within the EMU, however, has come at a cost to the balance with the rest of the world and, especially, with the US, which has long been averse to the Eurozone's cumulative trade surplus. Overcoming this internal balance, however, would entail a genuine politicisation of fiscal and economic policy (with the consequent overcoming of so-called monetary dominance). Politicisation without a genuine European federal political system, however, would most likely lead to an acceleration of the failure of the stateless currency experiment, rather than its transformation towards stable federal settings. The re-edition of a Stability Pact made up of hyper-technical rules and opaque decision-making procedures, essentially reserved to the unquestionable judgement of the Commission and the ECB, corresponds quite realistically to the aforementioned imperative of perpetuating the depoliticization of fiscal coordination of Eurozone States.