To protect its beach resorts from foreign competition, the Italian government tries to circumvent a European directive by giving national companies exclusive rights to current concessions. According to Italy, 67% of its beaches are still available.
Giorgia Meloni’s government aims to keep the Italian seaside concessions from the Bolkestein directive, which allows European companies to win deals and operate in other member states.
It argues that beaches are not scarce public assets because concessions account for only 33% of Italian beaches. However, new public concession offers for foreign companies could be made for the remaining 67%.
In 2022, a state-commissioned study was launched by the Technical Advisory Committee on Maritime, Lake and River Concessions to assess the scarcity of beaches as a public good.
On 5 October, the committee presented its findings to representatives of government ministries and tourism organizations. It concluded that concessions accounted for 33% of the total Italian coastline and that there was, therefore, no scarcity of this public good. Consequently, the Bolkestein directive should not apply, according to the Italian representatives.
During the discussions, resort managers called on the committee to extend their research to rivers and lakes, because Fabrizio Licordari, President of Assobalneari Italia, “this is information that will help the European Commission understand that the resources available in Italy are not scarce,” he told Il Giornale.
Keeping current resorts for Italian companies and granting new ones to international organizations
Nevertheless, the possibility of creating new concessions for foreign companies has been raised in return for allowing existing concessions to be renewed solely for Italian companies. For the remaining 67% of the beach, the Italian government wants to open up new public concession contracts for foreign companies, but without putting Italian companies at a disadvantage.
This decision was then sent to the European Commission for further discussions and negotiations.
The Bolkestein Directive of 2006 “aims to remove barriers to trade in services in the Europen Union.”
It requires member states “to abolish discriminatory requirements, such as nationality or residence,” allowing international companies to compete directly with nationals.
In February 2016, Italian beach operators began to worry about their situation and the possibility of competing with companies from the EU. They began demonstrating to demand that the government protect them and ensure that foreign firms did not distort the seaside economic system, mentioning even the safeguard of Italian tradition.
While Italian governments have always ignored EU infringement procedures since 2006, in 2022, Mario Draghi, then prime minister, decided to end the automatic renewal of concessions from 1 January 2024, provoking the wrath of the operators.
Resort managers effectively lost their exclusive rights to concession contracts by bringing foreign companies into the equation.
Giorgia Meloni’s government now plays on the potential loopholes in the Bolkestein directive and its multiple interpretations. It has invited the committee to show that beaches are not a rare commodity. And so, rather than renewing concessions, it suggest opening others to the foreign market without penalizing Italian companies.
