Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said on Saturday that Rome would not be "remote controlled" by Brussels, ratcheting up a dispute with the European Union over deficit spending and immigration. Renzi's comments followed a heated, long-distance exchange with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Friday and show the Italian premier is not ready to back down.
"Italy must make itself heard, and communicate...that the time when we could be remote controlled from the outside is over," Renzi said in a speech in Caserta, Italy, on Saturday that was broadcast on TV. "Europe cannot only be a bundle of rules that we have to follow," he said while speaking at a ceremony to open new museum space to the public at the city's 1,200-room Baroque palace of the Bourbon kings.
Juncker invited Renzi to tone down his criticism of the Commission "at every street corner" on Friday in Brussels, saying that he kept the bitterness resulting from attacks "in his pocket". In a television interview from Rome, Renzi shot back that he would not be "intimidated by sound bites... Italy deserves respect". Caught between the crossfire of two anti-euro opposition parties in Rome and wrestling with stubbornly low economic output after three years of recession, Renzi has opened up disputes with the EU on several fronts.
For example, Italy has blocked an EU plan to set up a 3-billion-euro fund to help Turkey stem the biggest inflow in decades of asylum seekers into Europe, saying the money should come from the EU budget, not national ones. But what is most important to Renzi is whether the Commission will grant Italy more fiscal leeway, which is already foreseen in the 2016 budget. Renzi is trying to reverse years of German-led austerity that quashed growth during the euro zone debt crisis as he seeks to breathe life back into the economy, the euro zone's third biggest, with state spending.