Permanent Transition: Understanding 2024, Navigating 2025

2024 left us with more questions than certainties. 2025 demands clarity, courage, and new tools to face an era of permanent instability.

By Glauco Pigoli

The first half of 2025 confirmed what 2024 had already made clear: we are living in a condition of permanent instability. Events in recent months - from the resurgence of conflict in the Middle East to the direct involvement of the United States - have intensified the transition toward a more turbulent global order.
Energy routes have once again become fragile, logistics and financial markets are volatile, and geopolitical priorities are shifting. Europe struggles to speak with a unified voice: defense, energy, industry, and foreign policy remain areas of national divergence rather than strategic cooperation. The sense of Europe remains more declared than practiced, and its ability to influence international balances still appears insufficient.

In Italy, the public debate shows a worrying disconnect from the productive reality. The recent labor referendum brought the issue of contractual protections back to the center of discussion, but often with ideological tones and little alignment with the system’s complexity. Structural challenges faced by businesses - from external instability to internal rigidity - remain unaddressed.
The contractual conditions of labor relations cannot be treated as a unilateral burden for companies. A new, pragmatic pact is needed - centered on sustainability, continuity, and a shared long-term industrial strategy that survives changes in government.

A long-term industrial strategy cannot exist without systemic investment in skills. Yet, there is a disconnect between local authorities and the productive fabric: many industrial players operate without dialogue with administrations. What’s missing is shared vision and collaboration to build development paths rooted in the local territory.

The education system is misaligned with business needs. Academic and vocational pathways struggle to generate qualified employability, and high-level skills often end up in low-value jobs. This creates disillusionment and weakens professional growth.
On the other hand, engagement and a desire to grow matter. Today, individual contribution is also measured by the ability to generate collective value.

A structural variable compounds the picture: demographic decline. The resilience of the productive system is at risk in the absence of generational turnover.
Managing migration flows intelligently becomes a key lever - but only if supported by inclusion strategies and training. Spain’s model of active integration offers a benchmark: it helped fuel 3.2% GDP growth in 2024.
Italy must also recognize that inclusion means investment - in tools, rights, and duties. Reception is not enough; inclusion must become part of the industrial vision.

Skills development requires both corporate support and personal commitment. Training becomes effective when workers are active participants capable of turning learning into competence. Only in this way can training drive shared growth and responsibility.
What’s needed is an ecosystem of ongoing dialogue between schools, businesses, and institutions. A territorial educational-industrial pact can translate national vision into local development.
Innovation is necessary - in training models, language, and labor policy.
And so is a renewed sense of national and European belonging, one that favors sustainable choices over short-term advantages.

Delocalization and imports from deregulated regions can no longer be acceptable shortcuts. Protecting our industrial know-how is a strategic choice for resilience, sustainability, and autonomy.

2024 already showed what happens when businesses face change alone. Now, in mid-2025, the urgency is clearer: we must act with clarity, vision, and shared responsibility.

2024 opened with familiar but unresolved tensions: the war in Ukraine, the Middle East crisis, residual inflation, European industrial weakness, the energy crisis, and regulatory uncertainty around ecological transition.
On top of this came anticipation for two key geopolitical events: the U.S. presidential elections and Germany’s federal elections.
Global businesses responded cautiously: freezing investments, suspending strategic plans, and postponing industrial projects.
This “wait-and-see” strategy came at a real cost, especially for highly interconnected countries like Italy.
Italy’s GDP closed the year with 0.7% growth - in line with the Eurozone - but well below what’s needed to support employment, investment, and social stability.
Germany’s slowdown (-0.2%) particularly affected the mechanical sector, hit by a drop in orders and declining production volumes.

At first glance, Italy’s labor market showed encouraging signs: over 450,000 new jobs in 2024.
But that figure is only superficial. Growth was concentrated in low-stability contracts: involuntary part-time, seasonal, temporary, or agency work.
Meanwhile, companies struggle to find qualified skills, and many workers feel underused or demotivated.
The mismatch - technical, geographic, generational - between supply and demand has become structural.
Adding to this is a quieter but growing phenomenon: emotional and motivational burnout.
This latent disengagement particularly affects younger people, especially in sectors with high relational demands.
Companies are seeing it in very tangible ways: declining initiative, lower participation, loss of purpose.

Inflation accumulated over the previous two years significantly reduced purchasing power, generating widespread wage pressure.
But the real issue remains the tax wedge: in Italy, the cost of labor for employers is among the highest in Europe, while net pay for employees is among the lowest.
This disproportion has fueled distrust, a sense of injustice, and growing calls for reform.
Yet 2024 ended without structural intervention - only temporary extensions and partial measures.
In early 2025, the issue returned to center stage with the labor referendum.
The referenda, instead of offering solutions, polarized the debate. Each political faction - whether in government or opposition - treated labor as an ideological battlefield, ignoring the real conditions of businesses and the complex issue of contractual sustainability in an economy constantly exposed to external shocks.
In such a context, without reducing the tax burden on wages, competitiveness and social cohesion are bound to deteriorate.

2024 marked the mature phase of “soft deglobalization”.
Businesses began redirecting supply chains based on proximity (nearshoring) and geopolitical security (friend-shoring).
Strategic sectors - artificial intelligence, microelectronics, biopharma, defense - have become the focus of new industrial and diplomatic competition.
Innovation is no longer just a competitive advantage, but a tool of geopolitical influence.
Europe has tried to respond with more cohesive industrial strategies but lacks true capacity for collective action.
Member states still act independently, and European companies are forced to operate in a context without a shared industrial vision.

From the year’s outset, international crises have re-emerged.
The Israel-Iran conflict, with direct U.S. involvement, has reopened global vulnerabilities: rising energy prices, logistical tensions, and financial market instability.
Meanwhile, Europe has once again shown its inability to react as a unified actor.
Internal divergences prevent rapid, coordinated responses.
The need to build a common industrial and defense policy is clear, but political will seems unequal to the challenge.
For Italian businesses, this translates into further strain: regulatory uncertainty, cost pressures, and planning difficulties.
In many sectors, the “wait-and-see” effect risks becoming paralysis.
And the absence of shared tools to confront crises continues to isolate those who want to invest, innovate, and grow.

2025 presents us with an increasingly stark crossroads.
Complexity is no longer a transitory phase - it is now a permanent feature of the environment.
Europe can no longer afford to be just a market: it must become a political and industrial entity capable of making decisions, reacting, and coordinating.
Likewise, Italian companies can no longer wait for external solutions. They must choose their own stance: active, transformative, and aware.
2024 left us with the awareness that crisis is now permanent.
2025 demands - starting now - that we act within this crisis using new tools: real collaboration, shared strategy, political courage, and internal coherence.
The direction is not something to endure. It’s something to choose.

Glauco Pigoli

architect - project manager