MEPs Push Brussels to End the Clock Change, and the Interior Counts Its Evenings

Forty-four members of the European Parliament, drawn from fifteen EU countries and six political groups, have written to the bloc's transport ministers asking them to restart a plan to end the seasonal changing of the clocks, The Local Italy reported on Wednesday. The proposal has been stalled for years, and the members want the deadlock broken rather than the file left to gather dust.

The reform would abolish the twice-yearly shift between summer and winter time, leaving each member state to choose whether it keeps permanent summer or permanent winter hours. That choice, not the principle, is where the argument has always snagged: neighbouring countries on different clocks would open and close their borders an hour apart.

The measure is not new. The European Parliament backed ending the change several years ago, but the file has never cleared the Council, where member states have declined to settle on a common approach. The letter from the forty-four members is an attempt to force it back onto the agenda of the transport ministers who would have to agree.

The complaint behind the reform is familiar: the disruption to sleep and routine that follows each March and each October, and the evidence, contested but persistent, that the spring shift costs lives on the roads in the days that follow. The Local Italy's report frames the members' intervention as a matter of unlocking a decision the institutions have avoided rather than of new science.

For Basilicata the question is less about the clock than about the light. In the mountain interior, where the days shorten sharply by late October and the villages of the Potentino empty early, the hour at which dusk arrives governs when the last bus runs, when the shops close and whether an evening is usable at all. A permanent summer time would give the region its light later into the day; a permanent winter time would take it away. Either way, the decision would be made in Brussels and applied to a province that has no say in it beyond its two MEPs.

There is a quieter consequence for the region's calendar. The autumn sagre, the harvest fairs that fill October weekends in the smaller towns, are timed to the failing light and the end of the olive and grape work. An hour's difference is not nothing to a village that lights its stalls at dusk. But no source in the wire states what Basilicata's towns would prefer, and the members' letter does not address it.

What comes next is procedural. The letter asks transport ministers to take up the file; whether they will is unknown, and the Council has shown little appetite for it in the past. Until then the clocks turn again this month, as they have every year, and the debate stays where it has been for a decade: agreed in principle, unresolved in practice.