Italian PM meets Van Rompuy, pledges a confidence vote on reforms

Italy's Prime Minister Enrico Letta met with the President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy on Wednesday and pledged to step up reforms in the recession-hit country. "I will ask a confidence vote next week to design a new majority in Parliament and bind it on a 2014 based on reforms, in order to make Italy more competitive," Letta said in a press conference after the talks with Van Rompuy. The meeting took place at Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of the Italian prime minister, in Rome. The two leaders talked in advance of the European Council meeting scheduled for December 19-20 in Brussels. EU President Van Rompuy acknowledged the progresses Italy has made so far to recover its economy and finances, but also pressed on the need for the country to stick to its plan of reforms. "Italy was capable to come out of the 'infraction procedure for excessive deficit' last year, and now it has to pursue in these efforts with a renewed political stability in order to achieve a sustainable growth," Van Rompuy said. "We believe we are on track to keep our public finances in order," Letta also said during the press conference. This specific remark came after skeptical observations were made by Olli Rehn, European commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, who had criticized Italy for failing to cut its debt quickly enough. "Italy should respect a certain speed of dept reduction, and it is not doing so," Rehn said to La Repubblica newspaper recently. The Italian government did not welcome the EU commissioner's observations. Italian public debt is the second largest in the eurozone after Greece. The country, however, has been struggling for the last two years to rise from a deep recession and increase employment and competitiveness, and it has gone through painful spending cuts and some structural reforms. The fear now among Italian authorities is that too much austerity would not help the economy to recover completely. Van Rompuy's visit and his praises for the efforts Italy has made so far seemed to have soothed, at least formally, the tensions between Brussels' authorities and Rome. Next year in June, Italy will begin its semester at the presidency of the Council of the European Union. "After years of work on tackling the crisis and of austerity plans, our efforts in the government and at the EU presidency will be focused on policies for development and growth," Letta concluded.