AUTONEWS

Why are the Italian government and Stellantis at war?

The Italian government and Stellantis are still at war and it doesn't look like peace is just around the corner. The attacks on the company led by Carlos Tavares took a new turn this week, with the Minister of Industry, Adolfo Urso, threatening Stellantis with a €370 million cut in already promised funds if the battery factory they planned to build in Italy does not materialize.

Like other manufacturers, Stellantis has slowed down its investment in electric vehicles, delaying or canceling the installation of specific factories for models with this technology, designed to produce more efficient and cheaper battery-powered cars. Tavares even announced the construction of three battery gigafactories, one in France, another in Germany and the third in Italy, in Termoli. 

And it is precisely this last one that is causing friction with Giorgia Meloni's Executive, since it was the only one of the three planned factories whose construction was suspended, which left the government on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Relations between Stellantis and the Italian government began to sour with the reduction in investment in the Italian industrial machine. 

And Meloni's team had every reason to be confident that Italy would not be sacrificed with the cuts in investment, since the one with the most power in Stellantis is the Italian Agnelli family, which controls 14% of the group (the Peugeot family owns 7%), in addition to being originally theirs nine of the 14 brands that today make up the consortium, at the time of FCA, resulting from the merger between the Italian group Fiat and the North American Chrysler. 

The "pinpricks" of the Italian leaders towards Stellantis began when Alfa Romeo announced that the new and affordable B-segment SUV, first called Milano and later renamed Junior, would be manufactured outside Italy, more precisely in Poland. However, this reaction is strange, since the model is produced in the same factory as the Panda, one of Fiat's most popular vehicles, even before FCA and Stellantis, which has always been produced in Poland to be cheaper.

The relocation of the production of the cheap Alfa Romeo abroad angered the government, but not as much as the suspension of the construction of the battery factory in Termoli, which explains why the government prevented Alfa's small B-SUV from being called Milano, arguing that it could not use the name of an Italian city while being manufactured in Poland. A few days after Stellantis was forced to change the name of its B-SUV from Milano to Junior, the Italian government has taken another swipe at the car group, seizing 134 Fiat Topolinos from Morocco at the port of Livorno, near Naples, where they are produced alongside equivalent versions from Citroën (Ami) and Opel (Rocks Electric) for displaying a small Italian flag the size of a cigarette on the side, when in reality they are built in Africa.

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