The Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has said citizen’s income plans would need reviewing if his League party wins a potential election, but pension reform plans remain untouchable.

Last week, Salvini announced that its coalition with the 5-Star party had become unworkable, just one year in, and called for a general election in October, Reuters reported.

In an interview with Corriere della Sera today, the deputy PM and Interior Minister said the citizen’s income scheme, which was introduced earlier this year, would be reviewed if his party were to win.

“With our government (pension reform plans) are untouchable... it will rather be necessary to reassess the citizen’s income,” he told the Italian newspaper.

The coalition approved the flagship welfare and pension reforms in January following election pledges from both parties, however, both plans have received criticism for being unsustainable for the country’s public finances.

The 'Quota 100' pension reform will allow people to retire when the sum of their age (62) and the years of pension contributions (38) totals 100.

This is down from a retirement age of 67 for many Italians, an age which was decided at the height of a debt crisis in 2011 which left hundreds of thousands of Italians who had quit work early expecting to retire shortly afterwards, stranded for years with neither a job nor a pension.

Critics have argued that in the long-term, Italy’s large public debt and ageing population mean it cannot afford to lower the retirement age. When the plan as approved, the changes were estimated to cost €4bn in 2019and over €8bn in 2020.

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