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But the Five Star Movement campaigned explicitly on the promise of delivering that assistance, and their support ballooned in the south partly as a result. The economic realities that come with governing have forced the party to backtrack on some guarantees, such as its opposition to a gas pipeline in the southern region of Puglia that it campaigned against for years but now calls strategic. The so-called citizens’ income, however, is now a critical element in their political identity.
Killing time with other unemployed women perched on parked scooters, Filomena Polumbo lamented the lack of job prospects in the city for herself and for her adult children and their spouses, with whom she shared a small apartment in a crowded street up the hill. Her sons-in-law managed to “get by,” she said.
“They steal!” her friend Giuseppina Iaccarino, 35, said with a laugh.
Ms. Palumbo, a 38-year-old grandmother, shushed her friend but then conceded with a shrug: “They can’t even get by doing that anymore. There’s not enough money going around. It’s not worth going to jail for nothing,” she said.
She said she had voted for the Five Star Movement because she hoped that its promised relief program — which the party’s leaders have sought to equate with the 1930s-era New Deal in the United States — would provide an alternative. “The government has to get the money flowing,” she said.
Since taking office though, Five Star’s popularity has shrunk while the League’s has expanded. The League is applying pressure on Five Star to support a high-speed rail project through the Italian Alps to France. Mr. Di Maio, who has a record of flip-flopping, keeps getting outplayed by Mr. Salvini and is clearly desperate to deliver. But it is his welfare proposal that is driving deficit spending through the roof and attracting the censure from the European Union.
In recent days, Mr. Di Maio has begun exploring the possibility of saving face by scaling back the welfare program, which critics say is merely an expanded version of the system put in place by the previous government that he excoriated.
Some of the hundreds of people who turn up daily up at the Naples job center have already started asking for the citizens’ income even though it does not yet exist. On a recent afternoon, Daniele Peluso, 17, showed up looking for a job. Instead, he found a guard explaining to frustrated job seekers through a locked fence that the region had failed to update its website for its new operating hours. They were now 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., not 2:45 to 3:45.
