Lucky timing and propitious conditions

This chapter aims to disentangle the possible impacts, either substantive or procedural, of the social dimension of the Europe 2020 strategy on the domestic arena. It discusses the procedural effects of Europe 2020 in Italy. By assessing multi-level interactions over the first five European Semester cycles, the study shows that, in Italy, the anti-poverty component of the European Union (EU) 2020 strategy had effects on stakeholder involvement, cross-sectoral integration, and substantive policy content. Despite the lack of incisive reform proposals within the first National Reform Programme in the field of poverty, the first cycle of the European Semester recorded a slight increase in the political salience of the issue with respect to the Lisbon era, at least at the political elite level. The Italian case seems to tell a story of 'lucky timing' and 'propitious conditions', as the constellation of factors that in our understanding eased EU influence in the period 2010–2015 was fairly peculiar.