Cabinet Italy approves its own budget

The Italian cabinet has approved its own budget for 2019 on Monday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said.

The coalition government of the right-wing populist Lega and the protest party M5S (Five Star Movement) wants to pump money into the economy on a large scale to attract it. Rome needs to go further into debt for that.

This is fiercely controversial because the Italian state already has an excessive debt burden. It has a size of approximately 133 percent of the gross domestic product (the Netherlands almost 57 percent). The EU has been urging for years that Rome will reduce its debt mountain.