FI risks undermining govt stability on 'ius scholae' -League

(ANSA) - ROME, AUG 23 - With his insistence on introducing 'ius scholae' - the possibility of foreign minors getting Italian citizenship if they complete one or two school cycles - Forza Italia (FI) leader, Deputy Premier and Foreign minister Antonio Tajani is risking undermining government stability, League Senate Whip Massimiliano Romeo said on Italian TV Thursday night.
    The centre-right FI has said it may push for ius scholae with the opposition while its government partners, the rightwing League and Premier Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, are dead set against it.
    The centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) and its leftwing allies are actually in favour of 'ius solis', automatic citizenship by birth on Italian soil, but have said they would work with Tajani on ius scholae as a compromise.
    "The ius scholae is not in the centre-right's electoral programme, it is not a priority and it is not on the government's agenda, so it is clear that it is hard to understand our Forza Italia colleagues," Romeo said on the programme '4 di sera' on Berlusconi channel Rete4.
    "Tajani's insistence does not so much bother the League, which has a clear position of its own and reiterates its no, but since it offers a platform to the oppositions it risks seriously undermining the stability of the government.
    "Honestly, we find it hard to understand what the point is." Romeo went on, about FI and its possible leftwing allies on this issue: "What do they do, present a bill in Parliament and approve it with the votes of the left? "What could happen? "Honestly, we find this insistence a bit curious.
    "To insist in this direction I don't know where it could lead." Tajain meanwhile said he refuses "impositions" and claims the right to talk about issues that 'are not in the government's programme, like ius scholae.
    "Being Italian is not linked to (having) seven generations (of ancestors)," he added.
    While FI and the League are increasingly at loggerheads over the issue, Premier Meloni or any senior FdI figure have yet to speak out about it.
    However, the premier is said to be more sympathetic to the League than to FI on the 'ius scholae', since she did not campaign on it and has said in the past that Italian citizenship rules are fine as they are.
    The issue of citizenship for the children of immigrants has come to the fore again with the victory of Italy's women's volleyball team at the Paris Olympics, where its star performers, like Paola Egonu who is of Nigerian heritage, where almost all children of migrants.
    At present such children have to wait until they are 18 to apply for citizenship, a situation which the PD and other leftwing parties have long argued is unacceptable. (ANSA).