avide Ruggeri, an 18-year-old high school student in Rome, first began to notice the effects of the migration crisis in his early teens. It was a time when North Africa was in turmoil. Thousands of people were fleeing in makeshift boats to Italy’s coasts and moving up through the rail network, in search of better lives in the wealthier countries of Northern Europe. Some made it to Ruggeri’s neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Rome, where they eked out a living in squats and the black economy.

The son of a teacher and an IT technician, Ruggeri holds the view — widespread in Italy — that the country has been abandoned by the European Union and forced to deal with the crisis alone: bearing the brunt without adequate funds to deal with it, disadvantaged by EU rules that asylum seekers must claim refuge in the country they first arrive in, irrespective of whether they hoped to travel on to another EU country.

Asked whether he feels European, he hesitates.

“It’s a really good question,” Ruggeri pauses. “Yes. I feel like a European citizen because we are in the EU, and we are one of the founding members. But at this moment I don’t see good things from Europe, because of the problems with immigration. They are helping us very little. There’s an emergency, and it seems like the only thing that’s important to them is money.”

Ruggeri is a member of an Italian generation that has known only economic stagnation, and which will head to the ballot box for the first time in a general election next spring. They were born around the same time as the euro — 1999 — and are now old enough to vote. They’ve seen nothing but political and economic crises since their childhoods, and politicians apparently unable to fix them.

The experiences of this euro generation are one of the reasons behind the widespread public disillusionment with Italian politics. They also help explain why Italy has gone from being one of the most enthusiastic members of the EU to one of its most disaffected — and why the country stands a not-so-little risk of handing the reins of government over to a Euroskeptic leader.

This outcome would upturn the EU’s political order and possibly reignite the financial bonfire that the Continent’s leaders have only recently managed to bring back under control.

“In my life, it seems that it has always been like this,” says 19-year-old Marialuce Giardini, a Milan native who has finished school but is not yet in work or university. “As long as I can remember there has been talk of crisis, and about how Italy needs to fix its economy.”

“A couple of years ago it seemed like perhaps it might get better, but I suppose it’s something that happens slowly,” she adds. “I can’t remember a time when the situation of Italy was good.”

Disillusioned youth

n countries like France, the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands, polls show a notable generational difference in attitudes toward the EU. Young people tend to feel more positively toward the bloc, while older people tend to hold less favorable opinions.

In Italy, the trend is reversed. Voters aged under 45 are significantly more likely to think Italy is on the wrong track (71 percent, compared to half of voters over 45), according to a study conducted by Benenson Strategy Group in October.

The study found that if Italy were to hold a referendum on EU membership, 51 percent of voters under 45 would vote to leave, while 46 percent would vote to remain. In contrast, respondents over 45 supported staying in the bloc by 68 percent to 26 percent.

Younger voters’ unhappiness with the EU came from a sense that what’s good for the bloc comes at Italy’s expense. Strong majorities among the young said that the migrant crisis showed the EU could not be counted on to help Italy with its biggest challenges. What it showed, they concluded, is that the EU only cared about itself.

There’s one thing young Italian voters have in common with their peers in other European countries: Less likely to vote, they are rarely courted by politicians, making them less interested in politics. But even then, in Italy the problem is exacerbated by demography. With nearly half of the Italian population older than 45, the young are outnumbered.

“For sure, the people who are in power now are really old. They are very removed from what we need now, and the needs of the future,” says Federico Borre, a 19-year-old from the Aosta valley who recently began studying at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “Young people definitely believe they are cut off from politics.”

Asked what major events he recalls living through, Borre reels off the prime ministers the country has churned through in the last six years. “Berlusconi, Monti, Letta, Renzi ...” he says. “No one was able to have a full mandate. The governments were changing rapidly.”

Borre’s generation is the most educated in Italy, but it also has the EU’s highest percentage of young people not in education, training or work — almost a third, according to Eurostat. Youth unemployment is the highest after Greece and Spain. For those with jobs, conditions are highly lopsided: a young army of precarious workers that can only dream of one day being granted the iron-clad contracts, pensions and protections of their older colleagues.

It’s a generation that thinks it will be worse off than their parents. Eight in 10, according to a survey of 16- to 30-year-olds conducted by the European Commission, believe young people have been excluded from a good economic and social life by the economic crisis.

These conditions have led to a long-running brain drain that has accelerated in recent years as young people — often the most ambitious and talented — seek better prospects abroad: a loss of Italy’s most cosmopolitan voices that further reduces the group that could introduce generational change.

Borre, the son of a teacher and a retired health worker, describes the EU in positive terms as an institution that allowed him to travel and learn English, and that invested in infrastructure in his region.

But like many internationally minded Italians, Borre does not see a future for himself in Italy.

“At the moment I have no plans to go back,” he says. “I’m more interested in the wider world.”

Euro bashing

lmost as soon as the first euro notes and coins began changing hands in Italy in 2002, the currency became the focus of generalized economic grievance. Ordinary Italians began grumbling that prices had gone up while wages stayed the same. Politicians tapped into this early: The Northern League called for a referendum on the return of the lira as early as 2005. As prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi used international events to play up friction with Germany and appeal to Italian pride.

Fast forward to 2017, and the euro and the EU have been turned into rhetorical punching bags by politicians of all stripes — from left to right, regionalist to neo-fascist. Conveniently, they shift blame for Italy’s problems outside the country.

Overall, just 39 percent of Italians believe the country has benefited on balance from being in the EU: the lowest level in the bloc, according to a recent Kantar survey by the European Parliament.

It’s a striking turnaround for a country that was once among the most enthusiastic about integration: the birthplace of EU founding father Altiero Spinelli and of the EU’s precursor, the European Economic Community.

The shift is reflected in the platforms and promises of the political parties that will compete in the next election, due before May 20, 2018. The 5Star Movement, which wants a referendum on euro membership, is forecast to win a quarter of the votes or more. The anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic Northern League has the support of another 16 percent.

It’s also reflected in how young people are casting their ballots.

In a vote last year that was widely seen in Italy as a blow against the establishment, Italians aged 18-34 voted in large numbers against center-left former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s electoral reform, siding with a No campaign championed by the 5Star Movement and the Northern League.

Anger in the heartlands

ario Dedi, a 20-year-old first-year politics student at the University of Trieste, dreams of one day entering parliament. Born to a seamstress and a truck driver, his first taste of public service was as a student representative on the council of his school in Portogruaro, a town in northeast Italy.

The position meant he could read his school’s financial accounts.

“The cuts to education were clear,” Dedi says. “The school wasn’t able to cover its expenses.” It introduced a voluntary tax for parents to be able to keep going. Expected funds from the central government did not arrive.

“I think that my generation has been failed in many respects,” Dedi says.

Asked what the most pressing issue should be for the next government, Dedi replies “immigration.” He describes attitudes to immigrants changing among the people he knows in Veneto, in Italy’s northeast, and said politicians needed to take action or the results could be dangerous.

“Politics isn’t just what political parties talk about,” Dedi says. “It’s what you hear between people when they speak about politics in the bar.”

“I believe that immigration could endanger Italian democracy, because it is causing revolutionary and even violent feelings in the working-class areas, in the stomach of the country,” he said.

A supporter of the 5Star Movement, Dedi views Italy’s adoption of the euro as a historic mistake that shackled the Italian economy. He views EU rules on spending as excessively punitive.

“I absolutely don’t feel like a European citizen,” Dedi said.

There is some evidence that the euro has benefited stronger economies like Germany while making Italy less competitive. Eurostat data shows Italians have become steadily poorer in terms of what they can buy since 2005.

But the reasons for that are not clear-cut: There was already economic stagnation before the euro, and indigenous structural problems are also at least partly responsible. Even if the euro has damaged Italy, it is not clear that leaving the currency — almost certain to be an economically traumatic event — would fix matters.

Yet politically, these nuances may not matter. Criticism of the euro and the EU reliably resonates with part of the electorate.

It is unclear what policies Euroskeptics would adopt if their rhetoric helps elevate them into positions of power. Even the most anti-EU parties have been inconstant in their messaging, dialing back demands to exit the EU outright to mere calls for reforms, as Brexit tests out what ending membership really means.

In recent months, the 5Stars, the Northern League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia have all settled on the idea of calling for an alternative, parallel currency to the euro. As a policy, it’s economically dubious and potentially destabilizing, but it taps into the national unhappiness while skirting the radicalism of dumping the currency altogether.

What is clear is that dissatisfaction with the EU and the euro will feature prominently in Italy’s election, and potentially in many elections to come, as the country’s long economic stagnation drags on and Italy’s crisis generation continues to grow.

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