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.
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