Despite Minister Calenda's dissent, Matteo Renzi's Pd goes straight: abolish the Rai fee, a tax that the Renzi government had helped to recover by incorporating it into energy utility bills and which the Dem secretary now defines as "a bad tax: public TV must be a right of citizens ".
Renzi intends to advance the proposal in the next direction of Democratic Party. A popular move and one that also plans to review i advertising caps which penalize the national public broadcaster compared to private competitors. To make the project sustainable "in the transitional phase - Renzi would have explained, according to the Republic, in a summit in the Nazarene attended by the faithful - the State will have to make up for the fee by transferring between one and a half billion e two billions per year at Rai. It is the same amount we were asking citizens with this ugly tax”.
However, there are no signs of approval from the current government. “The abolition of the Rai license fee would be a game (of) mockery”, commented the Minister of Development, Carlo Calenda with a play on words on Twitter. “I hope – writes Calenda – that the idea of abolishing the Rai license fee by replacing it with state funding is not THE proposal of the @pdnetwork for the electoral campaign as reported by @repubblica. State money is citizens' money and therefore it would be just a game (taking) of (in) fun".
But the political sense of Renzi's move is very clear: to flush out Berlusconi and challenge the center-right by starting a very popular battle. In fact, without license fees, Rai would have a free hand in the collection of advertising and this hypothesis makes Mediaset shiver but also in Cairo. On the other hand, in half of Europe the TV license fee has already been abolished: they no longer pay it either in Spain or in the Netherlands.
Read also - Rai Fee 2018: Here's how to get the exemption
