ITALY’S president,Sergio Mattarella, fired the starting pistol on December 28th for a marathon election campaign that may soon beget the markets fretting again approximately Europe and the euro. After a meeting with the prime minister, and 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 beget given citizenship automatically to children born in Italy to immigrants.
Approval of the bill would beget helped make Italy’s moment-generation immigrants feel welcome in the country they regard as home. But the plan 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 beget a very different complexion. The prime minister leads a wide 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, and more radical formation headed by the former Senate speaker and chief anti-mafia prosecutor,...
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Source: economist.com