Italy's big-spending 2019 budget was designed by the Italian government, not the European Union, populist premier Giuseppe Conte told reporters in Rome on Friday.
"The opposition plugs the notion of a budget written in Brussels. This is untrue, it was drafted in Italy," Conte said at his end-of-year press conference.
Conte said had never allowed the EU executive to call into question the key features of the budget (including a basic citizen's wage for the poorest and a lower retirement age for some groups).
"Any debate (with the European Commission) concerned the overall spending figures...never the type of budget and the measures it contains," Conte said.
The 2019 budget bill is due to be approved by the lower house of parliament on Saturday. The budget bill was approved by the Senate upper house of parliament on Monday in a confidence motion as the government races to get the bill voted into law by a year-end deadline.
To stave off EU financial sanctions for breaching the bloc's fiscal rules over its budget, the government in mid-December trimmed its 2019 deficit target to 2.04 percent from 2.4 percent, and lowered its GDP growth forecast from 1.5 percent to 1.0 percent.
The value of Italy's concessions to the European Commission was understood to be just over 10 billion euros.
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