The article analyses the process which led to the approval of Next Generation EU , including the Recovery Fund, and to the formulation of the National Plan of Recovery and Resilience presented by the Italian government to the European Commission in April 2021. Three specific dimensions are explored: the European component of the government’s actions in response to the emergency; the role of the parliamentary arena in guiding and checking the executive in the EU; the government-opposition subsystem regarding the definition of the policy options. Our hypothesis concerns the possibility that the choice of specific policy objectives associated with Next Generation EU entails a new form of politicisation of the European issues, no longer limited to the electoral competition, but present in the parliamentary arena during the policy process.