Il CBI, polar star of the 5 Star Movement, receives an unexpected rejection. That of Finland, the only European country to have introduced the measure, albeit as a pilot project. The Helsinki experiment began last year and will end at the end of 2018, but the liberal-conservative government has already announced that does not intend to continue with phase two.
The reason? The Finnish Executive has not yet published the results of the project - we will have to wait until 2019 - nor has it explained why it decided to abandon it, but according to rumors reported by Business Insider would have come to the conclusion that the planned subsidies are excessive, to the point of discouraging the search for a job.
Citizenship income in the Finnish sauce involves a very limited number of people in this first (and at this point only) experimentation phase, barely two thousand volunteers, which they receive from the state about 560 euros per month tax free. But be careful: the comparison with Italy does not hold up, considering that in Finland the average salary in the private sector is around 3.500 euros per month.
Furthermore, unlike other subsidies or support allowances, the Finnish basic income is paid without the beneficiary being obliged in exchange to look for work or to accept the jobs offered by employment offices. Not only that: the payments continue even if in the meantime the recipient manages to find a job.
The basic income experienced by Finland is therefore much more radical than the one proposed in Italy by the Movimento 5 Stelle, which – at least in its latest version – is in fact a very generous unemployment benefit but subordinated to the search for a job.
The second phase of the Finnish project was also supposed to involve low-income workers. Some experts underline that the interruption of the experiment prevents the achievement of the main objective, that is to understand whether the citizen's income would have prompted people to invest in training or to change careers, rather than to live on an annuity at the expense of the State.
And now? The Finnish Finance Minister, Petteri Orpo, announced to the Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper that "when the universal minimum income experiment ends, at the end of the year", the Helsinki government will launch "an experiment on universal credit”. In other words, various pro-poor tax benefits will be harmonized and concentrated in one system, on the model of what is already happening in Great Britain.