The Senate's party grist for the mill doubles the financing of politics

From next year, more than 30 million Italians, despite themselves, may be obliged to finance parties. Even without wanting to and therefore without indicating any political destination for their Irpef in their declarations. Envisaging the forced contribution is a pair of twin amendments to the tax decree under discussion in the Senate, presented by the PD and the Green Left Alliance. The corrective amendment, which seems to have a good chance of approval and is part of the laborious mediation attempt to get the measure stalled in Palazzo Madama to pass, modifies two crucial aspects of political financing: the rate turned over to the parties is reduced from 2 to 0.2 per thousand of the Irpef; an automatism - and this is the second move - will also distribute to the political forces all the unopted quotas in proportion to the choices expressed. This system, similar to the one already in force for the 8 per thousand to religious denominations, is intended to double the resources available to political forces.

With their last declarations in 2023, political forces had received 24.1 million euro from 1.7 million Italians. In practice, only five out of every hundred taxpayers had decided to devote a slice of their income tax to the life of the parties.

With the new mechanism, the same rule explains, the funding increases to 42.3 million per year, partly covered by the residues of the old election contributions. Those benefiting most will be the PD, Fratelli d'Italia, Lega and M5S. The latter, however, express opposition to the amendment. At the last round, in fact, the Dems had collected 8.1 million (i.e. one third of the total dowry), followed by Fratelli d'Italia (4.8 million), the Carroccio (1.1 million to which must be added ) and the Pentastellati (1.8 million). All figures - if the amendment passes - are now set to double.