The Italy of 2026 looks at the National Recovery and Resilience Plan as one would look at a great love story gone wrong: it began with lofty promises, in a nocturnal Brussels, and ended amidst ministerial paperwork, reporting delays and the unpleasant feeling of having wasted the last train to modernity.

If the genesis of the NRP was a masterpiece of diplomacy, its ‘grounding’ has become a manual on how bureaucracy can stifle even the most ambitious of European dreams.

The genesis: Between the ‘no’ to Eurobonds and the realism of Brussels

To understand where we went wrong, we need to remember where we started. In 2020, the media narrative painted a ‘gladiator’ version of Giuseppe Conte chasing Eurobonds.
The less fictional reality tells us that those Eurobonds never arrived.
Northern Europe’s response was a dry ‘flab’.
What did come instead was the NextGenerationEU, a historic compromise born not from a sentimental concession, but from a rational choice of the Franco-German axis.

Without the agreement between Merkel and Macron, Italy would have sunk. The breakthrough was not a gift to Conte, but a survival calculation by Germany: if the European internal market collapses, Berlin loses more than it would save by denying solidarity.

And here falls the first propaganda myth: the almost 200 billion was not the result of personal sympathy for the premier at the time. They were the result of a cold and ruthless algorithm based on GDP, public debt and the impact of the pandemic.
We received more than others because we were worse off than others.

If Conte deserves credit, it is that of having sat at the table and made Italy assume a European institutional posture, while part of the country flirted with leaving the Euro.
Others, according to the sovereignist declarations that flourished in those years, would not have even seen that train pass.

Those sovereignists who have never asked for a mortgage

We enter the heart of the ‘anti’ propaganda.
The voices of the ‘giants’ of sovereignist economics, from Claudio Borghi to Alberto Bagnai, still resound today, claiming with admirable seriousness: ‘We don’t need the Recovery, we can do it ourselves with budget deviations’.

It is an argument that defies the elementary laws of finance. Claiming that issuing only BTPs (national debt) was preferable to the PNRR is like saying that, needing a mortgage, I would prefer to go to the bank that charges the highest interest instead of the one that offers me subsidised rates.

The PNRR, taking advantage of the European Union’s triple A rating, has allowed Italy to save around EUR 2 billion in interest in the first five years alone. Yet, ‘professor’ Bagnai continued to plead the cause of national debt as if the spread was an opinion and not a real cost on taxpayers’ shoulders.

The illusion of ‘leftism’ and the failure of the tax model

The heart of the missed opportunity, however, lies in the transformation of the objectives. The NRP was supposed to be a public investment plan, not a shower of bonuses.

The state was supposed to ‘do’: build railways, digitise hospitals, construct or improve school buildings, etc. etc.
Instead we have witnessed a genetic mutation of funds, often used for tax purposes through the mechanism of tax credits.
Let us take the example of a school gymnasium: it is one thing if the state puts up the funds, puts it out to tender and delivers a work to the community. It is another if you give tax credits to private firms hoping that they will miraculously decide to invest in a gymnasium.
In the second case, control over the public utility evaporates and the effect on GDP is dispersed in a thousand rivulets that taste like an electoral ‘bribe’ and little else.

ReGiS: The Darkness of Bureaucracy

How can a 200 billion plan be monitored if the reporting system is a sieve?
The ReGiS portal, developed by a subsidiary of the MEF and managed by the MEF, has become the emblem of Italian inefficiency.
Data are updated with months to spare, making it impossible to understand in real time where the money has run aground.

It is 2026 and we are still navigating by sight. The small municipalities, left alone to cope with a monstrous amount of tasks, have often given up or presented sterile projects in order to ‘take the money’.
The result is a growth that, numbers in hand, has remained modest, far from the economic shock we were promised.

NRP: No Relevant Reforms at All?

The fiercest criticism, but unfortunately the most centred, comes from Tito Boeri: the PNRR has turned into ‘Just No Relevant Reforms’.
Europe had asked us to change the face of the Public Administration, Justice, Competition and Education.
We responded with a ‘homework’ approach: approving small measures, often cosmetic, with the sole purpose of unlocking the next instalment from Brussels.

We have made reforms ‘because we have to’, not ‘because we need to’.
Every year we have witnessed micro-decrees that have neither simplified the lives of citizens nor made the country more competitive. The bureaucracy has remained the same, only with more forms to be filled out to justify the use of EU funds.

The bitterness of a finish line without glory

In conclusion, the PNRR will remain a case study of how, for the umpteenth time, Italy was unable to take advantage of the opportunity.. We had the good fortune of a favourable Franco-German axis and the economic advantage of low interest rates. And despite this, nothing to do.

But today, in 2026, the bitterness in the mouth is strong.
If the money ends up in volatile tax credits and paper reforms, what is left is not a new country, but only a bigger (albeit cheap) debt and the knowledge that we have turned a renaissance plan into a low-profile routine.

The train has passed, but we were too busy filling out yet another bureaucratic form to realise that we were going nowhere.