The economic policy based on bonuses and concessions is legitimately questionable. And the idea of using bonuses to promote culture is certainly also questionable. However, it makes a certain impression that while the subsidies intended to support the cultural consumption of young people are being called into question, an increase in military expenditure of many hundreds of millions of euros is expected, as reported by the observatory on military expenditure Milex.
A definitive assessment can only be made when the economic maneuver developed by the government, and now under discussion in parliament, has been definitively approved. The path followed so far has been rather tormented, between announcements, denials, broken promises such as the one on electronic payments and controversies such as those that have accompanied the restrictive revision of the citizen’s income. This, in particular, was a highly symbolic choice of how the right intends to govern, and more generally of the idea of politics that the government led by Giorgia Meloni intends to represent.
Cross out what works
But perhaps even more representative of the ideas of the right now in power, and in particular of its relationship with culture, is the decision to review the 18app culture bonus.
Up to now it has been a contribution of 500 euros in favor of new adults which could be spent on the purchase of books, music, tickets for theater performances, concerts, museums, but also to access music, theater or foreign language courses, or buy newspaper and magazine subscriptions. In the six years in which the measure was active, it concerned about two and a half million young people for a total value of around one billion euros, mostly used for the purchase of books. In particular, in 2017, around 356,000 people used the bonus for an economic value of just over 162 million euros. The following year there were almost 417 thousand applicants for over 192 million euros. In 2019 it went to around 430 thousand applicants for almost 200 million euros, in 2020 to almost 390 thousand for over 183 million euros, and in 2021 to 415 thousand for more than 192 million euros. This year we have more than 440,000 applicants for almost 155 million euros, but the figures are not yet definitive.
Until now, the requirement to access the fund has been the age of majority. But now things could change. In fact, the maneuver being approved provides that the culture bonus will be replaced by two different measures that can be combined with each other, one linked to income and one to the grade obtained at high school. “The first”, explained the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, consists of a “bonus for eighteen year olds whose families have an ISEE not exceeding 35 thousand euros”, while “the other provides 500 euros for those who graduate with 100 cents”.
The bonus review process tells a lot about the right’s understanding of culture and cultural politics
Furthermore, Meloni announced that “the anti-fraud mechanisms will also be strengthened” since – at least according to what many representatives of the right-wing majority have claimed – that of scams is one of the main problems afflicting the current culture bonus. In reality, according to a report by the financial police, fraud between 2018 and 2020 would amount to around 17 million euros, of which around 13 were unduly received and the rest attributable to suspicious transactions. In that same period culture bonuses were spent for over 354 million. Therefore, the funds unduly received and the suspicious ones calculated together are equal to 3.85 percent of the total expenditure. It would not seem a figure that would justify the cancellation of the measure. Also because according to many cultural operators the bonus was working.
Among others, the publisher Giuseppe Laterza explained it on the pages of Repubblica, recalling the Istat data according to which there was a growth in readers between 18 and 21 years from 46 to 54 percent starting from 2016, the year of introduction of the bonus. Laterza also stated that “the innovative side of the 18app was that it allowed all the kids to choose how to invest that incentive, stimulating young people to get involved”, while “the new criteria veer towards a welfare approach” .
Another publisher, Stefano Mauri, expressed himself in a similar way when speaking to Corriere della Sera, according to whom in recent years the bonus “has produced a new wave of reading among young people, book purchases and familiarity with the book purchase, bookstores, online”. In short, “it has had a brilliant outcome in the life of some cultural sectors, and it has had it by following the choices of young people. We are talking about 0.0003 percent of state spending: leaving it in the hands of young people is not a great effort”.
It is early to understand if the measures that should replace the culture bonus will lead to comparable results: as mentioned, the accounts will eventually be settled given that for the moment the measures announced by Meloni are still in the approval phase. But there is already something that can be said, since what has emerged in recent days from the debate that accompanied the bonus review process tells a lot about the idea that the right has of culture and cultural policies.
Speaking in the newspaper Avvenire, the president of the Ali-Confcommercio Italian booksellers association, Paolo Ambrosini, stated that perhaps the positive, “multiplier” effect of the bonus which allowed young people “to approach culture in its various declinations with that freedom of choice that culture and knowledge require”. “Deliberately”, continued Ambrosini, “the bonus is aimed at those who come of age, i.e. when they develop freedom, even formal, in their choices, to offer a tool to be free and not conditioned by family economic needs or by the limitations imposed by educational models”.
Something very similar also underlined the writer Emanuele Trevi speaking on the pages of the Corriere della Sera: “I dislike it, it is the questioning of a state intervention that allows individual human beings who appear on the threshold of real life, regardless of the parental wealth, to spend 500 euros on books (as the vast majority did), on music, on other consumption capable of producing knowledge of the world or aesthetic pleasure”.
In short, the point concerns more cultural policy than economic policy. The state had decided to invest resources in the cultural growth of the newly adults, choosing a method that favored not only cultural consumption but also the exercise of free choices, independent of the cultural and economic conditions of the family of origin, and thus capable of favoring of personal emancipation. Now the right is denying that choice, in the name of purely economic reasons, as also emerges from the words of Meloni herself, thus completely losing sight of the noblest part of the measure. And reducing cultural policies to a welfare grant.
For decades the right has complained about the cultural hegemony of the left. She did it with victimistic and recriminatory tones. Now he would have the opportunity to assert his ideas. If the decision on the culture bonus is really representative of those ideas about cultural policies, then there really is something to worry about.