New Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to abolish unconditional basic income – and promptly received death threats for doing so. “If you take away my income I will kill you and your daughter,” one user wrote on Twitter. Italian police arrested the perpetrator of the threats, a 27-year-old man, on Wednesday.
“Be careful, you and your daughter get a knife in your stomach, you take away the income and I kill your daughter,” the user wrote on the Prime Minister’s official Twitter page. And he added, “Really, stop that basic income abolition thing or I’ll kill you, you know?”
User self-condemned with a profile picture
As the German online edition of italy24 wrote, the user hid under the pseudonym Sasha Manexi. But since he used a real photo of his face as his profile picture, the police tracked him down relatively quickly. On the orders of the prosecutor’s office of the Sicilian city of Syracuse, police officers searched the apartment of the 27-year-old unemployed man in Sicily. With the death threats, the Sicilian said he wanted to avoid the government’s planned abolition of civilian income from 2024.
Specialists from the police cybersecurity center seized the computer equipment and account used for messages against the prime minister. Meloni had already received death threats during her time as an opposition politician. She led a lawsuit against a stalker who threatened her for years.
The previous government introduced an unconditional basic income in 2019
One of the novelties in the budget recently adopted by the Meloni government is the phasing out of the civilian allowance (Reddito di Cittadinanza), introduced by the left-wing populist Five Star Movement in 2019. In 2023, Italians who can work and are up to 59 years old will be allowed to receive basic income for a maximum of eight months; from 2024 it will be abolished. The citizen’s income also stops if someone turns down a job offer that the government has judged to be “fair”.
Since 2019, 2.33 million people have benefited from the civilian income. The ruling right-wing parties argue that many working-age people would rather receive a basic income than work.
Source: Krone
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