Italy’s agenda

Italy’s priorities at home and at the EU level.

The policy priorities that Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, intends to present to the new European Parliament in Strasbourg on 2 July fall into three broad areas: growth and employment; external relations; and justice and citizenship. Each will have a number of events associated with it.

Italy’s term in charge kicks off with the traditional visit by the college of European commissioners to the country taking over the presidency, in Rome on 3-4 July.

The visit will be followed in quick succession by two conferences that are supposed to underscore the centrality of economic growth for Italy’s government. On 9 July, in Venice, it is co-hosting, together with the European Commission’s department for the digital agenda, a summit on the digital economy. On 11 July, it will host an employment summit in Turin.

The external dimension – which Italy’s permanent representative to the EU, Stefano Sannino, a former European Commission director-general for enlargement, mischievously describes as “all the things that you don’t expect” – will be focused on the Union’s neighbouring nations, especially Libya and Ukraine.

But the flagship event will be an October summit with the countries of Asia in Milan, the host of the Expo 2015. Most informal Council meetings will also take place in Milan.

The third area, justice and citizenship, will be the subject of both the June and October European Councils, which will deal, among
other things, with migration and the EU’s post-Stockholm justice programme (see page 19).

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