ITALY’S president, Sergio Mattarella, fired the starting pistol on December 28th for a marathon election campaign that may soon have the markets fretting again about Europe and the euro. After a meeting with the prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni (pictured), the president dissolved parliament. The election is set for March 4th.
The dissolution killed off one of the most passionately disputed bills to be tabled since the last general election in 2013. The proposed law would have given citizenship automatically to children born in Italy to immigrants.
Approval of the bill would have helped make Italy’s second-generation immigrants feel welcome in the country they regard as home. But the idea that italianità is a genetic inheritance is deeply rooted in the national psyche: an opinion poll this month found less than half of respondents supported the proposed law.
Mr Gentiloni promised to reintroduce the bill in the next parliament. But by then the government may have a very different complexion. The prime minister leads a broad coalition in which the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) is the dominant partner. But the PD has recently fallen sharply in the polls to below 25% and will face competition for the left-wing vote from Liberi e Uguali, a new, more radical formation headed by the former Senate speaker and chief anti-mafia prosecutor,...Continue reading
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