Dear Mr. Carioti, I had to read the proposal by Roberto Vannacci several times to attribute a greater number of votes to parents based on their children: two children would allow two extra votes, three children three extra votes, and so on. The rereading only served to increase my disbelief. Who benefits from such a system? Obviously immigrants, who have a fertility rate much higher than ours. The measure designed to encourage the birth rate of Italians would only serve to produce more parliamentarians favorable to immigration, and therefore laws of the same nature. Truly the world turned upside down. How do you explain it?
MARIA MARANGON-EMAIL
Dear Mrs. Marangon, I explain it by the inability of those who wrote that program. The right to vote in political elections belongs to Italian citizens and every year, under current laws, more than two hundred thousand immigrants obtain Italian citizenship. Among them are tens of thousands of Moroccans, Bengalis, and Pakistanis: communities overwhelmingly Muslim. Pakistanis and Bengalis, in particular, have a high birth rate and naturalize with an extraordinarily high proportion of children in tow: over 40% of the new citizens of those nationalities are minors. With the multiple voting proposed by Futuro Nazionale, each adult with children would vote multiple times: they would become an electoral power in a very short time. In short, the general’s contradiction is glaring: he proposes solutions that worsen the problems he himself identifies as priorities. His program warns that “for the moment” multiple voting is “only an idea we offer to the Italian debate”: this means that not even Futuro Nazionale has properly considered it, but throws it out there anyway. It is called (to be kind) superficiality and amateurism. It should be added that children’s ideas do not belong to their parents and that a seventeen-year-old right-wing or left-wing would have good reasons to be angry to be represented at the polling station by a father or mother who thinks the opposite of him. But I realize this is a liberal subtlety, useless to explain to Vannacci and the authors of his chaotic program.
