MEPs Press EU Ministers to End the Clock Change, and Italy Keeps Its Hour

Forty-four members of the European Parliament, drawn from fifteen member states and six political groups, have urged the EU's transport ministers to break the deadlock on ending the seasonal change of the clocks, according to The Local Italy. The file has been dormant for years: a 2018 European Commission proposal to abolish the twice-yearly shift never cleared the Council, where member states could not agree on which hour to keep permanently. The signatories are now asking ministers to put it back on the agenda.

For Italy the question is not abstract. Under the current arrangement the country falls back to Central European Time on the last Sunday of October, which this year is 25 October, and the effect is felt hardest in the north-west. Turin sits at roughly seven degrees east, near the western edge of the CET zone, and on the shortest days of December the sun there is not up much before eight in the morning. A permanent switch to summer time would push that past nine, keeping schoolchildren and commuters in darkness for the first hour of the working day.

The counter-argument, familiar from the debate in Brussels, is that a permanent winter hour would bring sunrise before four in the morning in June, which is of little use to anyone and would cut the light from the evening. The Local Italy's report does not indicate which hour the forty-four MEPs favour, only that they want the deadlock broken. That ambiguity is the reason the file has stalled: the Parliament voted in 2019 to end the changes, but the Council has never settled the question of which time to adopt.

The practical case for the change rests on health and sleep. Researchers who favour abolition argue that the spring shift costs an hour of sleep and produces a measurable spike in road accidents and heart complaints in the days afterwards. Those who favour keeping the current system argue that the twice-yearly adjustment is a trivial inconvenience next to the disruption of moving a whole continent's working hours, and that the real question is not whether to change the clocks but which time zone to live in.

The deadlock in the Council reflects a genuine geographic split. Member states in the west of the Central European zone, among them France, Spain and the Netherlands, would prefer to keep summer time permanently, so that evenings stay light. States in the east, and the Baltic and Nordic countries, are more attached to winter time and its earlier dawns. Italy has not been reported as having taken a firm position, and The Local Italy's account does not attribute one to the Italian government.

Piemonte's own stake is modest but real. The region's economy is industrial and its working hours are early by southern European standards; a permanent summer hour would mean that in December the shift change at a Mirafiori plant or a commuter train into Porta Nuova would happen before first light. The Alpine valleys to the west, where the sun sets behind the ridge well before the official time, would lose the last of their afternoon light earlier in the year.

The MEPs' letter is a request, not a decision. Any change would require a qualified majority in the Council, and the file has now sat for eight years without one. The Local Italy's report gives no timetable for a ministerial response. Readers planning travel around the last weekend of October should note that the clocks still go back on 25 October, and that the November transport strikes separately flagged by The Local Italy will fall after the change, when evening journeys begin an hour earlier in the dark.