Renzi: On the issue of increasing migration, ‘I beg you, let’s stay human’.DPA/RomeItalian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, whose popularity has faded after local election setbacks and a migration crisis, made a bid to revive his political fortunes yesterday by unveiling bold tax cuts for the next three years.Renzi pledged to scrap an unpopular levy on primary residences, as well as taxes on agricultural land and industrial machinery, in 2016.He also promised to cut corporate taxes in 2017 and income taxes in 2018.The strategy has worked for the centre-left leader before.He led his Democratic Party (PD) to victory in European Parliament elections last year after his government promised an €80 ($87) tax cut for low-paid workers.“My pledge here, in front of you, is to achieve over five years a reduction in taxes with no comparisons in the republican history of the country,” Renzi said during a PD national assembly in Milan.A similar commitment on property taxes helped his centre-right predecessor Silvio Berlusconi win an election in 2008.Berlusconi kept his word once elected but was accused of populism, and the tax was reintroduced by another government in 2012 in order to save Italy from default.Renzi insisted that cutting the property tax was a good idea – even if his scandal-tainted rival had originally proposed it – and was confident he could deliver on his promises while respecting EU rules on budget discipline.Government sources indicated that the tax reform package would cost €5bn ($5.4bn) in 2016, and €20bn in each of the following two years.Stronger-than-expected economic growth and extra savings in public expenditure could help fund the measures.But so far growth projections for Italy’s economy are feeble, and the government has repeatedly missed targets to trim public spending.A survey released by the IXE polling institute on Monday showed that the lead enjoyed by Renzi’s Democratic Party and its allies over the conservative opposition had slimmed to five percentage points, from a peak of about 15 percentage points in May 2014.Renato Brunetta, parliamentary speaker for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, said that Renzi had “zero credibility” on tax matters, and accused him of trying to get out of a political rut through “annuncitis”, a sort of empty-promises syndrome.Renzi also addressed immigration in his assembly speech, calling for tolerance after neighbourhood groups backed by neo-Fascist activists staged violent protests in Rome and near Venice against the arrival of asylum seekers in their communities.“I beg you, let’s stay human,” he said, recalling the suffering of many of the people who land on Italy’s shores.The premier cited media reports about a Syrian man who recently arrived in Sicily who said his 10-year-old diabetic daughter had died at sea because human traffickers threw away a bag with her insulin treatment (see report this page).The prime minister also promised parliamentary approval before the end of the year of long-delayed legislation that would recognise same-sex partnerships.He urged a Democratic Party executive and junior minister for parliamentary affairs, Ivan Scalfarotto, who has been on hunger strike for almost three weeks to protest delays in the approval of the bill, to start eating again.Italy, a traditionally Catholic country that hosts the Vatican in its territory, is the only country in Western Europe where gay couples are not legally recognised.Monsignor Nunzio Galantino, general secretary of the Italian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, said that the government was wrong to give political priority to the issue.“Given the urgencies facing us, this focus is bizarre,” Galantino told the Ansa news agency. “It is a shame not to see [the same focus] on effective measures supporting the family.”