Brexit has been grabbing all of the attention in Europe as an embattled British Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided to punt again on Wednesday, making it the second time in under three weeks that the deadline has been pushed back.

The new deadline, October 31 of this year, is like kicking the proverbial can down the road, with European officials periodically checking in on any progress that, or more likely the lack thereof, on a mutually agreeable exit plan between the Labor party, the Tories, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the European Union (EU) itself.

However, Britain’s messy exit is not the only problem in Europe these days. In fact, in other member countries like France and Germany, Brexit is hardly even talked about.

More pressing for many in Europe are the headwinds facing some of the countries hardest hit by the European sovereign debt crisis seven years ago, namely Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

In Italy in particular, the concerns over their budget deficit and attempts at fiscal austerity persist.

Italy’s finance ministry on Tuesday projected a higher budget deficit from the most recent budget proposal at 2.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), greater than the two percent target negotiated with Brussels last December.

More concerning, is the fact that the government appears to have used overly-optimistic growth projections in their calculations. Official government projections see 2019 growth at one percent, roughly in-line with the rest of Europe. However, consensus projections are much lower, around zero growth with groups like Oxford Economics even projecting slightly negative numbers for 2019.

Lower growth means a lower tax base and therefore lower revenues for the Italian government.

This in turn could further widen an already too-large deficit and further agitate European officials.

A large budget deficit at odds with European leadership could unsettle a market which had mostly calmed down since last year’s elections.

In the elections, Italy saw the rise of a highly Euroskeptic governing coalition between the anti-EU 5-Star movement and the nativist League Party.

The two parties’ original campaign promised to increase pension and welfare spending while ignoring any fiscal limits placed by the EU, which scared foreign borrowers and led to a spike in Italian bond yields as investors fled the market.

The yields rebounded as the coalition government back-down from some of their earlier campaign rhetoric and made a commitment to European fiscal goals at the end of last year, but this potentially large budget deficit overshoot could send yields back up as fears of non-compliance once again drive foreign investors away.

Between 2010 and 2012, the double whammy of a global recession and slower European growth pushed many European governments, including Italy, to the brink of default on their sovereign debt, which had been building up to unsustainable levels for years.

We could be seeing a repeat in the conditions which led to that crisis, namely a persistently slow and slowing growth rate combined with increasing levels of debt.

On top of these worries, Italy has a much larger total debt load than it did leading up to the previous crisis.

As it stands now, Italy’s debt makes up 132 percent of its overall GDP, making it the third-highest debt to GDP ratio only after Japan and the United States.

So while Brexit may be grabbing headlines as of late, the situation in Italy merits a closer-watching as their budget woes threaten to destabilize the Eurozone, which is already teetering near recession, something that economists and policy-makers are desperate to avoid.