ARCI kicks off campaign for referendums on labour and citizenship from Brussels

Brussels – In a month’s time, on April 25, the countdown to the five referendums on labour and citizenship on June 8–9 will officially begin in Italy. A month before, tomorrow (March 25), ARCI Italia will kick off the referendum campaign abroad from its Brussels circle—a call for an “extraordinary mobilization” for rights and democratic participation. Five questions “to which it is objectively difficult to say no,” argues the president of ARCI Italia, Walter Massa, reached by Eunews on the eve of the campaign launch event.

In early June, Italian citizens will be called to vote on four referendum questions on precarious employment and safety at work, for which more than four million signatures have been collected. The referendum to halve from 10 to 5 years the time of legal residence in Italy for applying for citizenship was filed in the Supreme Court with 637,000 signatures. The event organised by the Brussels-based Circolo ARCI at the Elzenhof cultural centre, a stone’s throw from the European Parliament, will be attended by Massa himself, representatives of CGIL (Italia Labour General Confederation) and the delegations of the Democratic Party and Sinistra Italiana in the EU capital.

The one in Brussels is the first ARCI circle born abroad, “the most numerous and the most solid,” and, above all, it is the ideal launching pad for issues that “do not only affect Italy,” says the president. From casualisation to job insecurity to the issue of citizenship that touches on the more general one of migration. All dimensions in the crosshairs of “an attack on civil rights” underway throughout Europe.

According to Massa, on citizenship, in particular, Italy “is absolutely lagging,” and a yes vote in the referendum would be a decisive achievement for about 2.5 million Italian citizens of foreign origin who are born, grow up, live, study and work in Italy. “How can you say that you don’t agree that a boy who was born in Italy and has been here for 18 years cannot get citizenship in five years instead of 10? I mean, how do you do that?” the ARCI president urges.

The same is true for the four labour questions, with which the sponsoring committees are basically calling for guaranteeing reinstatement in the case of dismissals without cause, suspension of the six-month ceiling on compensation in the case of unjustified dismissal, mandatory reasons for the use of fixed-term contracts, and amendment of the rules on contracts with the extension of liability to contractors in the case of workplace accidents.

“There is a discouragement in the younger generation, legitimate for that matter, that is disturbing,” Massa warns. Young people are increasingly leaving Italy in search of a future. Therein lies the importance, also symbolic, of starting the referendum campaign from one of the most popular destinations for “brain drain”: “With the five referendums, we try to put right some of the distortions that have led many to go abroad,” says the president of ARCI Italia. Furthermore, referendums are also “a great opportunity” to heal distrust in institutions and instruments of democratic participation because “unlike elections, your vote counts directly.”

That is why, after the Brussels event, the referendum campaign will also pass through ARCI circles in Madrid, Barcelona, and Basel. To be able to vote from abroad will be not only AIRE (Anagrafe Italiani Residenti all’Estero) members but also Italian citizens temporarily abroad for health, work or study reasons for at least three months. The latter will have to notify their status to the relevant consulates no later than 32 days before the referendums are held.