Minimum Income Schemes in Southern Europe: European Mobility as a Test for Social Europe

The last-year election victory of Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy was linked in the public imagination to the first point of their political programme: the institution of a new minimum income scheme, namely the “Reddito di Cittadinanza” (RdC). Few months after the election in March, it was time to keep the promise: the negotiation of the terms of the Budget Law with the European Institutions and its approval made the Italian central government responsible for the implementation of the new policy. At the moment we are writing, the detailed contents of the RdC are still very vague; nonetheless, Italy was just the tail-end of a process that has begun many years ago when those European countries that had not provided yet to guarantee a minimum income scheme within their borders, started one by one to accept the recommendation repeatedly expressed by the European Commission of the necessity of such measures to fight against poverty and social exclusion; with the Italian RdC, all the Southern European countries have now implemented a minimum income scheme. Many researches focused on re-tracing the process through which the schemes were approved and implemented in Portugal, Spain and Greece, but this is not the aim of this paper. We will try to combine two different elements, the minimum income schemes and free mobility in Europe considering that European citizens should be recipients of the same services and privileges of “local” citizens in any host Member States. For this purpose, first we will try to highlight the most relevant characteristics of the schemes adopted in the four countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy) in terms of actors involved, means-test and selectivity, amount of resources, social services and any active measure provided to/for the beneficiaries. The analysis will be useful, on the one side, to keep in mind the differences between the four countries; on the other side, to try to underline the commonalities and the features they share. Secondly, we will analyse each scheme under the light of the “European mobility” to understand which regime has been foreseen for European citizens from different Member States. The expected results could be summarised as follows: the requirements to access the minimum income scheme for European citizens from other Member States could be hard to meet or, conversely, the conditions could be equal/similar to the one guaranteed for the local citizens; the result could tell us something with regards to the Social Europe as the latter one could be viewed as a step forward to its realisation. The analysis is even more interesting in a welfare cluster as the one of the Southern European countries both for its specific features and for the possible “contamination” between them – expected mostly in the later-adopting countries, Greece and Italy.