It is quite emblematic as the Italian debate continues to rotate around superstitions and fake news. Do you remember when your mothers told you that it was necessary to wait “three hours before bathing” after eating? Or when we were convinced that more than two eggs a week would have caused us a rise in cholesterol? All popular beliefs without any scientific foundation. Here, lately in our country, popular beliefs without scientific foundation are transformed into state laws, reforms, regulatory devices that then condition everyone’s life and the future of the nation.

The House Plan

“Without a house it is more difficult to build a family” he thundered the premier in front of the audience of the Rimini Meeting. That’s why, Meloni anticipated, Italy starts to launch a home plan for young couples. We still do not know the contours of the device but we can already anticipate that it will be a tactical, strategic and social error. And unfortunately populist approach.

How do we say it with so much Sicumera without having read a line of the measure? It is very very simple: accommodation is not the first problem of young Italian families; It is not the difficulty in finding a house that determines the frightening data on Italian birth rate. Certainly there are small areas of the country (Bologna, most of Milan and Rome, Florence, Venice Center …) where the prices of the houses are high. Or rather they are high compared to salaries. But 80% of Italy live a collapse of the real estate values ​​that has been persisted for years, which appears unstoppable and which makes the cost of the house really the least relevant of the issues.

Stopping salaries and blocked development

Families do not have children first of all for economic reasons. The salaries have reached ridiculous levels and Italy is the only western country where you earn less than thirty years ago on average. This takes place because the economy has not modernized sufficiently, the development of numbers in hand is blocked, the arrival of largest and most organized companies is ostracized in many sectors (emblematic what is happening in the world of taxis or in the world of bathing, with the beneficito of the government), there are huge anti-concrete corporate bags that alliscia politics instead of fighting and the inefficiencies associated with a great public debt generate a public debt generate a public debt. monstrous fiscal wedge. Result? Asphyxiated economy and consequently payments too low: with low wages no one makes children willingly and a new population of qualified residents is not attracted.

Why are schools closed for 3 months?

But there are other reasons that the government could face if the demographic frost really wanted to unlock. Let’s talk for example of the school: even just the absurd costume of the three months of summer stop are a good reason for many couples thinking about it not ten but one hundred times before procreating. And if we go out of the defects of the compulsory school, what about nursery schools and kindergartens? Widely inadequate services that pose young couples in front of a three -output crossing: invest a large part of the salaries in fees, abdicate the second child and more and more often also to the first, or give up working for one of the two parents. A school reform and a security of finding a place in public nursery schools would give results like and more than ten floors home. As well as a stop to the crisis of public health: who has all this desire to bring new individuals into the world in a country where the national health service is going to Ramengo?

Hostile cities

From elementary schools onwards there is also an important and sensationally neglected theme of children’s autonomy. Our children do not go alone to school: comparison data with neighboring countries such as Germany are really chilling. Turn around or by bike in the city to reach school is considered (sometimes with reason) “dangerous” by the parents who thus feel invested with the obligation to accompany the boys often to the first high school. Net of the disaster that this generates in urban mobility, the circumstance remains that having children turns into an uncomfortable commitment that lasts years and years, a daily sentence for parents who do not exist elsewhere in Europe. The government could have improved things since he put his hand to the reform of the highway code, but Matteo Salvini (the same minister who is following the house plan) decided to further worsen things by drawing a rule sewn around the interests not of people (less than children!) Wasting cars. As if we were in 1975 instead of in 2025. The laws that hinder road safety, speed camera, cycle paths, pedestrianizations or areas 30 are laws that generate a hostile city for children: but if we make so uncomfortable and punitive to have a child and grow it in the city, obviously we will have less children who are born.

But let’s go back to the theme of the house more strictly. If the government is convinced (it is not clear on the basis of which data) that the problem of young couples is the accommodation, then why does not put the rents on the legislation? Today for an owner it is very penalizing to rent a house to a family. Very understandable that you prefer to rent the second homes to tourists or students shortly. A more suitable law would put a lot of accommodation on the market by making prices collapse: all at zero cost and very quickly.

The areas where there is a high quality of life

A further reflection to make concerns the internal areas of the country. If it is true that it can be more difficult to put in the world new babies in large cities, in its intention to increase the birth rate of the homeland, the government could therefore bet on the internal areas, on the villages, on the towns of the hill and mountain where the quality of life is high and inversely proportional to the cost of the same. An ideal context to encourage births. Too bad that – as rightly denounced by many in the last few weeks – the recent national strategic plan of the internal areas suggests for these areas that represent 60% of the country a sort of “assisted suicide” with cynical and renunciation statements that have affected and marked. Outside the most crowded urban areas, Italy could be a paradise for families with children but if the policies and investments go in the opposite direction a potential paradise becomes an inferior of depopulation and abandonment.

In short, we are a country where the laws on families do not work, a country that has abandoned its precious internal areas outside the big cities, a country with a stagnant economy for over 30 years with a system dominated by lobbies, medieval corporations and bureaucracies that have no feedback in other competitors. We are a country where public health, public school, nursery schools do not provide adequate services. And a country where salaries are an insult compared to the cost of living. That’s why young couples don’t have children. That’s why according to the United Nations Italy is 140th out of 143 countries for birth rate. Then add all the medieval obstacles that the Italian state sets to unconventional procreation and non -traditional families: a further deterrent to the arrival of new children.

By analyzing all this scenario it is blatantly evident that you can also give it restored and equipped with the bedroom already furnished for children to the young families, but perhaps in return you can have their vote in the next elections certainly not babies for the next generations. To obtain new births it is necessary to act on much more. Specifically, the government must pass from an approach from the populist and superficial right to a European right, liberal and reformist right. The opportunity would be all there, the will and perspective vision seems to be missing.