Europese Commissie houdt Italië aan economische hervormingsbeloften (en)
BRUSSELS - Eurozone leaders have in a public paper and in private talks tasked the European Commission with keeping Italy to a laundry list of promises on economic reform.
The euro summit declaration, published in the small hours of Thursday (27 October), devoted four paragraphs to recording what Italian leader Silvo Berlusconi earlier told peers he would do to stop Rome going bust.
The euro declaration added: "We invite the commission to provide a detailed assessment of the measures and to monitor their implementation, and the Italian authorities to provide in a timely way all the information necessary for such an assessment."
Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso i in the post-summit press briefing read out Italy's main pledges - such as balancing the budget by 2013 - and noted that Berlusconi is also bound by personal remarks made behind closed doors.
"The spirit of the meeting was clear - we had good exchanges about this with the prime minister of Italy and there was a very clear insistence of all the participants on the need to have concrete implementations of the agreed objectives," Barroso said.
The commission in a troika with the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank (ECB i) already monitors economic policy in euro-countries with bail-outs - Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
But its solo role on Italy is comparable only to monitoring of Bulgaria and Romania on anti-corruption reforms.
Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly on Thursday underlined the novel nature of the arrangement, saying: "This is a first for monitoring a country not in a [EU-IMF] programme. This is enormous."
Italy and its €1.8 trillion debt is at the centre of market worries over eurozone stability.
Fear of an Italian default forced leaders on Thursday to boost the capacity of the EU's rescue fund, the EFSF i, to €1 trillion. It also prompted French President Nicolas Sarkozy i to schedule a call with China's Wen Jibao to ask him for help and saw the ECB promise it will keep buying Italian bonds for now.
It remains unclear how the commission will actually hold Berlusconi to his word, however.
The Italian premier on the eve of the summit shot off a press release saying nobody in the EU can "appoint themselves as supervisors" or "give lessons" to Rome.
His eccentric style was also on show on Sunday when he demanded live on TV that Italy's man on the ECB board make way for a French candidate in a reshuffle. "I don't know if the TV is the best way to send out such a message, but okay. Please don't ask me any more about Italian politics," Sarkozy told media on Thursday.
Even if Italy's septuagenerian playboy means what he says, his coalition partners, the nationalist Northern League, signed up to hiking the retirement age under extreme protest. Volatility in Rome was again on show on Wednesday when MPs threw punches at each other in parliament over pensions reform.
Leading Italian daily La Repubblica the same day wrote that Berlusconi will step down in December or January, adding another layer of uncertainty. But the government denied the report.