Forty-Four MEPs Press Brussels to End the Clock Change, and the Alps Keep Waiting

Forty-four members of the European Parliament, drawn from fifteen EU countries and six political groups, have written to the bloc's transport ministers urging them to restart the plan to end the twice-yearly changing of the clocks, according to The Local Italy. The proposal has been stalled for years, and the letter is an attempt to force it back onto the ministerial agenda.

The file matters more in the Alps than in most of Europe. Trentino-Alto Adige sits at the eastern edge of the Central European Time zone, and in the depths of winter the sun rises late over the Dolomites and sets early behind them. A permanent choice between summer and winter time would be felt here as a change to working daylight, not an abstraction.

The Local Italy reports that the members are asking transport ministers to break the deadlock and get the plan moving again. It does not report a date for a ministerial decision, and the letter is a request rather than a binding step. What it shows is that the proposal has not been formally abandoned despite years of inaction.

The clock question has a particular resonance in a region that shares its time zone with Austria and Germany and its border with both. South Tyrol's economy runs on cross-border commuting, freight over the Brenner and winter tourism, all of which are scheduled to the hour. A unilateral move by one member state, or a split between neighbouring countries, would complicate timetables that currently assume a single clock from Innsbruck to Trento.

The letter is also a reminder of how the European Union's slower files work. A proposal can be endorsed in principle and then wait, because the member states cannot agree on whether to keep summer time permanently or winter time, and because each choice redistributes daylight differently from north to south and east to west. The MEPs' intervention does not resolve that disagreement; it only asks ministers to confront it.

For the autonomous province, the practical stakes are modest but real: school and work start times, the opening hours of mountain refuges, the schedules of the regional trains that link Bolzano and Trento to Verona and Munich. None of this is in the wire, and none of it should be overstated. The dispatch is simply that a dormant European file has been pushed back into view, and that mountain regions are among those with the most to weigh if it moves.