Italian politicians and their "gold salaries": saved once again

Italian politicians cost us a disgustingly huge amount of money. If at least they deserved it… But they so don’t.

The Italian parliament counts almost 1000 MPs. Twice the American Congress, even though Italy only has a fifth of the American population.

And they get the highest salaries in Europe. No, wait. Maybe in the world. Many of them earn more than US President Barack Obama. Actually, according the data that were released in February, Obama earns less money than the President of the Italian “Electric Energy and Gas Authority”. And the Italian Senate’s stenographer earns as much as the King of Spain. No kidding.

So, I hope, everyone wants a law to cut politicians’ salaries. In the last months, a civic committee called “Comitato del Sole” started to collect signatures to propose a referendum about this topic, but it was suspended. Why? Because the deadline to get the 500.000 signatures we need to submit the proposal was this week. And we only got 250.000 so far. According to the Italian law, if you don’t get enough signatures by the deadline (or if the referendum doesn’t reach the needed threshold, or if the referendum gives a negative outcome), you have to wait five years before you can start a new signatures collection. So they rightly decided to postpone it for now.

Italian fellows? You are all so good at complaining. What about doing something? I am well aware that this signatures’ collection wasn’t advertised at all by state media, but if you care at least a little bit about the subject, you must have heard about it.

Apparently now they will start collecting signatures again in October. Maybe in the meantime we could spread the word, so that more people decide to show up and sign in October. Please, please, PLEASE, Italians: wake up!

Reuters article