Controversy over 18app. Vacca: Was it in danger of jumping? Pd's fault. Renzi: pentaleghists admit it was useful

Last November 23, the minister of cultural heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, signed the decree extending the culture bonus for 18-year-olds to those born in the year 2000: the confirmation of 18app for 2018 and 2019, after all, had already been announced at the beginning of Bonisoli’s term. Young people born in 2000 will be able to benefit by registering on the 18app platform by June 30, 2019, and will be able to spend the bonus by December 31, 2019.

However, just in recent days, the culture bonus has been at the center of a heated controversy between the 5-Star Movement and the Democratic Party. Before the decree was signed, the very young Dem Arianna Furi (the youngest member of the PD’s National Executive) had launched a petition on change.org to ask the minister to release the funds. In the petition, it read, “Was it not enough for you to insult 18-year-olds? Calling the bonus a ’campaign token’? Keep fooling us by making money meant for us disappear and end up who knows where? We want access to our country’s cultural heritage. We want to be guaranteed what we have been promised and assured.” The petition had then been taken up by MP Anna Ascani of the PD, who in a post on her Facebook page stated, “we will also have to prevent them from canceling the one for those born in 2001. Bonisoli has done nothing but contradict himself since he was appointed but the truth is that he wants to eliminate it and does not even have the courage to admit it. Let’s stop him!” She was echoed by Matteo Renzi, who moreover referred to 18app as the “Renzi bonus”: “when an 18-year-old buys a book or goes to the theater or enters a museum I feel proud to be Italian. Salvini and Di Maio blocked the #bonusRenzi for 18-year-olds born in 2000 and want to cancel it for those born in 2001. Let’s make our voices heard to unlock the funds before December and prevent them from cutting them for next year.”

After the decree was signed, further igniting the controversy was Undersecretary Gianluca Vacca (M5S), who blamed former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for the delay in signing the decree: “instead of telling lies about the culture bonus,” Vacca said, “Matteo Renzi should have the modesty to keep quiet and apologize to the children of 2000, given that due to the incompetence and failures of the previous government, the bonus for those who have turned or will turn 18 in 2018 risked jumping. It was this government that remedied a regulatory gap highlighted by the Council of State and saved the measure. And today Minister Bonisoli signed the implementing decree that supplements and extends the bonus to those class of 2000. The truth is that the PD cared so much about the culture bonus that it ’forgot’ to make a primary-level regulation extending it to the 2018-2019 biennium as well, and if we did not intervene, the money would have been lost. Instead, kids will continue to have the 500 euros to spend on culture, and there’s more: we want to make the measure structural and not propagandistic, as the PD had instead thought, just for electoral purposes.”

Renzi, however, wanted to retort, saying that the confirmation of the bonus for 18-year-olds and other measures introduced by his government (such as the 80 euros, the baby bonus or the 500 euros for professors), although challenged, were later confirmed or partially reintroduced. “The truth,” the former premier sentenced, “is that even the pentaleghists are forced to admit that those measures were useful. To the point that they also confirm them. But how? All this hatred against my government and then you confirm our measures? They dumped quintals of mud on us and then try to copy us. While you are at it, then, copy well.”

Controversy over 18app. Vacca: Was it in danger of jumping? Pd's fault. Renzi: pentaleghists admit it was useful

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