Italy's prime minister halted on Saturday the launch of tenders for a high-speed rail link to France, defusing a dispute within the ruling coalition over the project that had threatened to bring down the government. The multibillion-euro TAV project (Treno Alta Velocita) is backed by Matteo Salvini's League party but strongly opposed by its coalition partner, 5-Star Movement, which argues that Italy's share of the funding would be better spent upgrading existing roads and bridges.
Tensions between the two sides had escalated ahead of a Monday deadline for the company overseeing the project, TELT, to launch tenders to carry out works on it. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in a post on Facebook he had asked TELT to halt the tenders because his government had committed to "totally re-discussing" the project.
Conte published a response from TELT, which said it would only launch the tenders for the French portion of the rail link on Monday in order to avoid losing European Union funding. Conte said that Italy would hold discussions with France and the EU in light of a recent cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the Italian government, which found the TAV was a waste of public money.
Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, who is leader of the 5-Star Movement, said earlier in a Facebook post that the dispute was "being resolved positively." "Let's talk about something else and carry on," he wrote.