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“Europe listen to us, it is the last appeal”, this is the cry of alarm launched from Naples by the president of Confindustria’s Small Industry, Giovanni Baroni. In Naples, in the Pietrarsa Railway Museum of the Fs Foundation, «The European way to sustainability was discussed for two days. SMEs between opportunities and unknowns”. In fact, sustainability is a great opportunity for small entrepreneurs, if supported with investments and putting the business and its competitiveness back at the centre. But so far this has not been the case, for Italian companies and beyond. In European industrial supply chains “the situation of uncertainty is terrifying”, warns the president of Confindustria’s Small Industry.
Transitions create blockages and slow down investments
«Or there is a European institution aware that these transitions are creating friction, blockages, and therefore it goes to unblock this mechanism, and you can start making investments again, everything freezes. We cannot overcome “a freeze” that has caused Europe to lose “technologies that have been developed elsewhere, because there have been no investments”, underlines the leader of Confindustria’s small and medium-sized enterprises. A few weeks before the European vote, the president of Small Industry also makes an appeal to the Italian Government. and to the Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, who spoke at the Neapolitan conference.
Tajani: «Allowing businesses to compete»
«In Europe we need an industrial policy – said Tajani – An industrial policy that identifies objectives, that provides rules that allow companies to compete and I am referring in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises». Then he adds: «We need to strengthen the role of politics in Brussels too, because everything cannot be decided by an elephantine bureaucratic power, which has enormous power». For Tajani, “We need to go back to politics and decide”, we need “political will”. The Foreign Minister says «No to choices that are, let’s say, for happy degrowth or that impose unattainable objectives on industry and agriculture to reduce CO2 emissions». The minister refers to cases such as «European housing legislation» which «is not good because it imposes enormous sacrifices on European citizens. It can be done differently.” Or the “blocking of the production of non-electric cars starting from 2035. It is a choice that will lead to the loss of around 70,000 jobs in Italy if there is no correction”. «Everything – he underlines – must be addressed with a policy in favor of business, which also looks at small and medium-sized enterprises in our country, which number in the millions, and we have a duty to protect them because they represent the connective tissue in Italy, but also in Europe of the economy”.