Italy’s education minister Lorenzo Fioramonti has quit citing a funding crisis.
He resigned as Italian MPs approved next year’s budget, which failed to give him the funds he wanted for his ministry.
Politicians, working to avoid an increase in VAT, did not reach Fioramonti’s funding threshold of €3 billion for staying in office.
“I made a commitment to put education — fundamental for the survival and future of every society — at the centre of the public debate, underlining on every occasion that, without adequate resources, it was impossible to stop the emergencies that afflict school and public university,” Fioramonti wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.
Italy’s 2020 budget law passed Italy’s parliament by 334 votes to 232 on Monday after long negotiations between parties.
Fioramonti said in his social media post that there was a lack of political will to find money to fund school and research, emphasising that in his view the future of the 21st-century economy is based on “human capital”.
A 2018 European Commission report on education found that Italy has worse results than other EU countries and spent less on education. The report said the country risked losing one million students in the next 10 years
