UPDATED 2025
The Reddito di Cittadinanza (literally, Citizenship Income) has been Italy’s controversial social welfare experiment during the 2019–2024 period. Born as a political promise of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), it aimed to reduce poverty and push people back into work. It was politically explosive, useful in the short term, but fragile in the long run. This article explains how it started, how it worked, why it failed, and what replaced it.
👉 Related: read our guide Understanding the Italian Welfare State.
Origins: from a blog idea to law
The concept traces back to Beppe Grillo’s web-based activism. Through his blog beppegrillo.it, one of the most followed web pages at the time, Grillo (a famous Italian comedian that had been banned on TV for years) managed to form an anti-establishment community that later became Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the 5 Star Movement). Grillo laid the idea of a universal minimum income as one of the Movement pillars. After M5S became a political party and entered government, the measure was fast-tracked into law as the Reddito di Cittadinanza in early 2019. The reform replaced earlier, smaller poverty-relief schemes and aimed to combine cash support with active labour policies.
How the scheme worked
The benefit was means-tested: households had to meet income, asset, and residency rules (including a minimum residency requirement). Payments were to low-income families and individuals and came with conditionality: beneficiaries had to accept job offers, attend training, and follow an agreed personalised plan. The state introduced a network of “Navigator” figures. These were hired to help beneficiaries find jobs, prepare CVs, and coordinate with public employment centres, and used ANPAL (the national employment agency) tools to manage profiling and placement.
Scale: how many people were paid?
Numbers grew quickly. In the first months a large wave of applications arrived and, during the pandemic years, the pool expanded. INPS and independent analyses recorded peaks of over 1.3–1.4 million beneficiary households (roughly 2.5–3 million individuals at times) with the high point often cited around mid-2021. Administrative reports and research papers document these figures and show how numbers increased during 2020–2021.
The ‘Navigator’ system: promise and reality
The idea of “Navigator” tutors was simple: pair cash support with active job-search assistance. In practice, the operation was messy. The Navigator role was new, employment centres were fragmented across regions, and procedures varied. ANPAL produced manuals and portals for Navigator work, but regional differences, slow coordination, and scarce availability of job offers limited effectiveness. Several studies and commentaries flagged that profiling often identified beneficiaries with low employability or local labour markets without suitable jobs. The result: many people remained on benefits because adequate reintegration paths didn’t exist.
Political geography: why it won votes (and where)
The measure was very popular, especially in the South of Italy. It addressed actual poverty and gave immediate relief to households excluded from official labour markets. For M5S, the policy translated into political advantage: it spoke to disaffected voters and those outside steady employment patterns.
Why it became unsustainable
There were three main structural problems. First, cost: at scale, the program required huge public spending. Second, administrative capacity: local employment services and municipal “active inclusion” structures were not ready to manage mass reintegration. Third, design limits: residency and asset rules, conditionality loopholes, and the gap between the program’s ambitions and labour-market realities meant many people could not move quickly into stable jobs. Scholars and policy reviews argued the measure reduced absolute poverty but didn’t always create durable employment outcomes.
The political arc: decline of the scheme
As political winds shifted, so did policy. The right wing government led by Giorgia Meloni announced early that it would tighten or replace the Reddito; debates on abuse and dependency amplified this position. By late 2023, reforms in the Bilancio (the Italian budget law) and subsequent measures dismantled the original design. On 1 January 2024, the Reddito di Cittadinanza was formally ended, and replaced by narrower subsidies (for example the Assegno di Inclusione and targeted training), with stricter eligibility and stronger conditional rules. The fading of M5S as a disruptive force became apparent, and in order to survive, the movement fully embraced its new role as a more conventional political party.
What the experiment taught us
The Reddito di Cittadinanza was not a simple success or failure. It helped reduce poverty for many households (statistics showed a measurable fall in absolute poverty numbers), but it failed to build a system for wide-scale labour reinsertion. The program highlighted a wider point for Italy: a generous cash transfer needs matching investments in local job counselling, training, and a flexible but well-staffed public employment service. The experiment also showed the limits of transplanting Scandinavian-style universal ideas into a country with weaker regional labour markets and fragmented public services.
Key takeaways
- Origin: A flagship M5S policy that moved quickly from party platform to law in 2019.
- Scale: At peak more than a million households received support; figures vary by report but the program reached millions of people during 2019–2021.
- Design: Combined cash with conditional job-search duties and a new Navigator workforce — promising, but under-resourced.
- Outcome: Short-term poverty relief succeeded; long-term employment integration mostly fell short.
- End: Replaced on 1 Jan 2024 by narrower, more conditional programs amid broader political shifts.