British News Agency

Italian Prime Minister Meloni commented on the country's economy and the government's tax policies in an interview with the newspaper Milano Finanza.

Meloni said the political stability provided by the government has enabled Italy to navigate one of the most difficult economic periods of recent years with greater confidence. She said that when the government took office, Italy faced the risk of having the credit rating of its government bonds downgraded to “junk” status, while the country's risk premium stood at 240 basis points.

Meloni said the current economic outlook is different, emphasizing that the Italian economy has shown resilience. She described data for the first two quarters of 2026 as encouraging, saying the economy grew by 1 percent in the April-June 2026 period compared with the same period of 2025, while the realized growth rate for 2026 stood at 0.8 percent.

Addressing tax policy, Meloni said that after the government took office, the priority was to support the purchasing power of low- and middle-income groups.

In this context, tax and contribution measures aimed at reducing employer costs were made permanent, while the income threshold for employees benefiting from the measure was raised to 40 thousand euros.

Meloni said changes were also made to income tax, with the first two tax brackets merged and the second tax rate applied to incomes between 28 thousand and 50 thousand euros reduced by 2 percentage points.

Meloni said the tax cuts implemented by the government provide Italian citizens with a total of 21 billion euros annually. She added that tax advantages on fringe benefits, reducing the tax rate on productivity bonuses from 10 percent to 1 percent, and raising the access threshold for the flat-tax system to 85 thousand euros are also among the measures supporting the middle class.

Meloni said the middle class carries an important part of the Italian economy and that they want to further ease the tax burden on this group.