Meloni and the spread, posthumous indignation for a live gaffe

Giorgia Meloni is no stranger to blunders about the economy in Parliament. Last December 17, in her reply to her communications on the European Council, she said that it is difficult for us to cut spending because "Italy has been in a primary surplus for some time". In reality, when Meloni spoke, Italy was coming from four years of enormous primary deficit (between -5.5% and -3.6% from 2020 to 2023) and only in 2024 did it return to a minimum surplus (0.4%). It was no small gaffe: it showed that the prime minister does not have a clear idea of ​​the country's fiscal position.

Now she has gone bigger. In question time on Wednesday in the Chamber, Meloni went so far as to say – speaking of the spread below 100 points – that “Italian government bonds are considered safer than German government bonds”. A blunder that made Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti shake his head and that implies, on the part of the Prime Minister, a confused idea of ​​the concept of spread. But Meloni's mistakes also show the limits of the opposition.

What went unnoticed, but is still significant, is that no one in Parliament responded to the Prime Minister's sensational material and conceptual error. Yet after Meloni's statement on the spread, three important members of the opposition intervened: Maria Elena Boschi , Giuseppe Conte and Elly Schlein. Not just any three MPs, but three leading members of their respective parties. Meloni's blunder was an easy assist for an intervention by the opposition on how far the government's propaganda is from the real conditions of the economy, but it went completely unnoticed by those in the Chamber.

It is true that on economic issues in politics, in general, there is little awareness: probably if the prime minister had got a subjunctive or the capital of a country wrong, perhaps there would have been vehement reactions from a ruling class a little more knowledgeable about the humanities. But that is not a sufficient justification. Maria Elena Boschi was undersecretary at Palazzo Chigi, Giuseppe Conte was the main tenant of Palazzo Chigi and Elly Schlein aspires to become one. All three should know – and probably do – what the spread is and that it is technically impossible for Italian debt to be considered less risky than German debt (at least as long as the spread maintains a positive value). They could have easily retorted that Greece has a spread of 75 points and therefore it means that the markets consider Italian government bonds less safe than Greek ones: a true fact that clashes clamorously with the false triumphalist description of the government. But they did not do so. Why?

One explanation lies in the dynamics of political communication that has made the parliamentary debate a literal representation of the “political theater” : everyone presents themselves with a pre-packaged intervention, decontextualized from what is happening in the Chamber, made specifically to be published on social networks. Boschi had prepared a sensational aphorism about lies (missing the real one uttered by the prime minister); Conte had constructed his intervention on the theatrical scene of “let's stand up” for the victims of Gaza , immediately followed by “the president is staying seated, eh?!” (a fragment promptly isolated and spread on social media); Schlein had brought a graph on health spending to show to the cameras and promptly relaunched by the PD on Instagram.

The paradox is that, once the parliamentary debate was over, the opposition saw Meloni's mistake reported by users and journalists on social media and prepared indignant tweets and vitriolic press releases to report the Prime Minister's blunder on the spread that they hadn't noticed. In practice, politicians go to Parliament to perform a skit intended for social network users and then find out from social network users what happened in Parliament: so they decide to comment on the incident, with a post on social networks.