Minister Giorgetti and President Meloni’s privatization plan is short-sighted, jeopardizes the government’s ability to intervene in strategic sectors and could result in deteriorating the quality of infrastructure and increasing the cost of services for citizens.
There is no notion of industrial policy behind this plan. The narrative that privatization improves the management of public companies, so popular in the 1990s, is no longer believed by anyone.
The only idea behind it is to get some immediate cash, trying to scrape together a few pennies – €20 billion over three years, according to government announcements, which covers less than a budget bill – by selling off the family jewels. The Italian Post, ENI, the State Railways (FS), RAI, the bank MPS: very few sectors will be safe from the drive to monetize.
With this plan, annual cash flows of billions of euros in dividends will be gone forever: from ENI alone, the government has collected a billion a year between 2021 and 2023.
This is certainly a short-term plan. But it is also a plan that puts at risk the supposedly all-important “national sovereignty” (important in speeches, that is).
The mess they made with ENEL Green Power is there for all to see.
The publicly owned share of the electricity group’s capital became so diluted that at the 2022 shareholders’ meeting, the risk of investment funds imposing their own alternative board of directors to the one proposed by the Finance Ministry was averted by a hair’s breadth. This danger is always around the corner, and could return following the privatizations of the other giants. There is a risk of giving up decision-making power over the energy transition, its financing and management, at a time when these issues are of primary national interest.
It is also a dangerous plan for infrastructure. Meloni wants to bring in private investors, not only at Trenitalia, the train operator, but directly into the parent company FS. This would mean privatizing – at least in part – the rail network that was created with public investment and invaluable both strategically and financially.
FS also owns the ANAS highway network. When it will be necessary to make investments in these two networks in order to modernize them, to bring them up to standard, to fix their normal wear and tear, it will no longer be possible to draw on public funds as today. Private money will have to be used, which will then have to be paid back in some way. How? By offloading the costs onto the buyers of train tickets.
Finally, the privatization of FS is a first step towards a future separation of the railway network from the line management. This plan is not even all that hidden, and if it comes to pass, it will be a step prescribed by an ideology refuted by history.
The UK case, with the privatization of ’93, paints a clear picture. Separating rail infrastructure from operations has led to catastrophic consequences. British trains are perpetually late, have extremely expensive tickets, and accidents on the lines – with serious consequences for workers – are the order of the day.
In order to raise a little bit of cash today and buy the electoral favor of the categories whose taxes they intend to lower, Giorgetti and Meloni are giving foreign investment funds the gift of cash flows for decades to come, jeopardizing the national infrastructure in sensitive and strategic sectors: energy, transportation and banking.
