From Brussels a Minimum Income as Rossi and Spinelli Dreamed in Their Manifesto

Despite its inefficiencies and often failures, the EU aims not only to combat poverty, but, in a more ambitious dimension, to eradicate the risk of “social exclusion”, that is notoriously based on broader and more demanding parameters of various kinds, capable of intercepting every element of mortification of the dignity of the person according to a more complex approach, transcending the disposable income.This element already points out that the EU is still able to reach very advanced levels of planning (often innovative), but with no results matching what had been conceived. The studies on policies contrasting the risk of exclusion, set up since the end of the 1990s on the basis of the socalled “open method of coordination” (OMC), are clearly very advanced at the global level not only for their approach, that brings back into focus the “indecent”, underpaid, precarious and discontinuous work (of the so-called working poor), but for their thoughtful and properly supranational character, as they methodically compare the various national approaches and try to select the best practices in an attempt to generalize them (through a sort of European moral suasion), while taking into account national specificities where the competence remained to the individual states. What emerges from this comparison, extended to the social actors, can be read in the annual Joint Report on social inclusion, which is at least a documentary path for understanding in broad terms what was to be done and what was actually done. In the debate on the“constitutionalization”of the EU (which led to the Treaty of Lisbon) it was decided to strengthen the fight against social exclusion, in a double direction: on the one hand, the strengthening of the OMC, through specific provisions of a general competence by the coordinating Union (Articles 4 and 5 TFEU) and, on the other, the establishment of a specific scheme for combating social exclusion (Article 153 TFEU), albeit requiring unanimity and without regulatory powers. On this basis, in the Recommendations annually addressed to Italy by the EC and the Council, the evident shortcomings of the social protection system and the abnormal number of people living below an income sufficient to guarantee a free and dignified existence and not covered by a minimum guaranteed income (MGI), as required by Art. 34 of the Charter of Rights, have always been highlighted. There is to mention the important attempts to arrive at a sort of soft codification of the principles of flexicurity, i.e. the formula with which the EU wants to ensure an existential security for all (December 2007) and the launch of a new general strategy called Europe 20-20, which introduces the new target to reduce by 20% in ten years the number of those at risk of social exclusion; furthermore, in the TEU (Article 3), the fight against social exclusion is one of the objectives of its policies. This is a complex, nontrivial plan, if we also remember Art. 34 of the Charter of Rights, which exerted considerable pressure on the countries lacking effective tools to fight poverty (those in Southern Europe) so that they introduce more suitable protection schemes and a certain mutual contamination of social protection models (at least until 2008), also fueled by the functioning of the common market,