22 January 2018 – World news for this week
A harbinger of woe given the Italian set up…
Berlusconi against the Five Star ‘sect’
His coalition stands at around 35% and he’s thinking of appointing Matteo Salvini as minister of the interior and himself as Prime Minister, if Strasbourg allows. The real battlefield is in the South, where the centre-right and the 5 Star Movement are to all intents and purposes the only contenders.
The latest polls (Euromedia) suggest that 32% of the electorate will not vote (some say as many as 37.5%). If the undecided are distributed equally among the various parties, the Democratic Party is ranked first with 8% of potentially undecided voters, followed by Forza Italia with 3.2%. Voter intentions on the other hand have the centre right at 39%, allocated as follows: Forza Italia 18%, Northern League 13.5%, Fratelli d’Italia 4.4%. Noi con l’Italia- UDC, 2.4%, other centre-right forces 0.7%. The centre left accounts for 27.9% of the vote with most of the votes for the DP: DP 24.2%, Insieme 0.4%, Più Europa 1.8%, Civica con Lorenzin 1.2%, SVP 0.3%. And then the two lone runners: M5S 26.3%, Liberi e Uguali 6%.
The geographical distribution of the voting intentions in Italy is very easily outlined: the centre-right dominates in the north, the DP prevails in the centre (with the Marche the exception), and in the south there’s a head-to-head clash between the centre-right and the 5MS which currently – 45 days before the vote – sees the centre-right ahead by 5 points.
The general trends seems to favour the centre-right, but the names of the candidates and the events of the coming weeks risk having a considerable impact on today’s poll results. We’re following closely…
Il Sole 24 Ore has opened a mail box ‘iotivotose@ (I will vote you if@)
The electorate has taken this opportunity to outline what they want to be asked to vote for.
Growth, simplification, incentives and tax rebates, tax and legal reform, less bureaucracy in Public Administration… and some explain why they have no intention of expressing a vote. Those who don’t believe that the party platforms will be real, and those who find the promises of economic reforms utopian… Both non-voters and voters agree on the need for believable programmes. At least those writing to ‘iotivotose@’ find easy slogans hard to swallows… and lead to ‘no shows’…
Employment, particularly for the young, gets a boost from the 2018 budget
The government aims to create 300,000 jobs in 2018.
The Re-employment check and tax relief for companies for training. The youth threshold is raised to 35 for all of 2018. The Bonus applies to first full time employee contracts, but can also be used to transform a trainee contract into a full time contract, and to convert a fixed-term contract into a full time contract. The tax relief for social service contributions varies between 50 and 100% in certain very specific cases, such as for example, employment within 6 months of graduation, or after a period of school-monitored employment with the same employer, after a trainee period required to obtain a qualification.
The Chinese Tidal Wave
To get Chinese tourists flocking to Italy and the investments that go with it, the country has to speed up its internet connections and work on product placement in Chinese soap operas.
Italy is ranked third in the vast wave of Chinese tourism, behind France and Spain, even though it has the lowest risk of terrorist attacks. The Chinese are not coming to Italy in their droves due to the low standard of internet connections (especially wi-fi, the Chinese are hooked to their smartphones). The Chinese only pay ‘online’ – UnionPay, Alipay, Wechat – all unknown payment channels in Italy outside the major centres and when seeking tourist information they mainly turn to their social own networks (Tencent, Wechat, Tuniu), where the great influences operate (Chinese who always communicate in Mandarin). For example, the tower of Pisa began to be overrun with Chinese tourists after being praised in a famous soap opera broadcast on Chinese television.
For the past four years, China tops the rankings in tourists (129 million tourists in 2017 with estimates of 700 million in 2022) but in Italy there are only 300 facilities that have the Chinese ‘welcome’ sign.