anyone know what's going on in italy?

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a couple days ago i found out about the constitutional referendum in italy (scheduled for december 4), which i hadn't heard of until now (blame trump, i guess ):

http://www.thelocal.it/20161114/everything-you-need-to-know-about-italys-constitutional-referendum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_constitutional_referendum,_2016

it seems like the "no" vote has the lead right now but it's still fairly close to a tie. the thing is, besides the ban on opinion polls already in place, which i guess means anything could happen and we wouldn't know until december 4, there's a possibly significant detail that i suspect has gone unnoticed by the pollsters all along (maybe on purpose?): the voting doesn't happen in italy alone, because it's not residence-based. there are millions of italian citizens abroad, and i have reasons to believe that the turnout might be surprisingly high

but... i'm out of the loop, so i don't really understand: why are so many people leaning towards "no" in the first place? it sounds like a pretty straightforward question to me: "what do you think of shrinking the italian government?". well YES, please! beyond that, it gets too technical for me to understand anyway. so what's the catch? or is it really just that the vote has become a matter of "yes = renzi" and "no = eurosceptics" because of renzi's statement that he'll resign if the reforms are rejected?

lol i guess someone is aware of that, then

I think your explanation is more or less correct with it coming down to pro-EU people against the Eurosceptics, I imagine the referendum's purpose is to strengthen the chief executive and streamline governance aka austerity to stay in line with what the EU dictates whereas the opposition is just everyone that opposes that from all sides of the political spectrum.

It will be a very interesting year in 2017 for Europe, the UK and US had populist uprisings and I don't expect it to end here.

i'm hoping it won't all end up with "screw the system!" winning everywhere though. even when and where the sentiment may be appropriate, the value of stability (even when things don't seem so stable) shouldn't be underestimated. and of course, "anything but this bad thing" doesn't necessarily mean anything better. 2017 might be the year when many people will be realizing that (people in my country included)

i think i'm just not voting for the referendum. it seems like it's boiling down to domestic political squabbles, and i'm just too out of the loop (and too far away to be involved anyway) to have an opinion on that. in the end the merits and flaws of the actual proposal and its fine print seem to have been lost in all that. on one hand the spirit of the proposal sounds great, and i would rather vote for "the pro-eu option" anyway, so that would be a "yes". but on the other hand it's not easy to tell if it doesn't have serious flaws that could defeat its purpose in the end, or if maybe it contains questionable stealthy clauses meant to benefit certain people

that's oversimplification though. i don't know if that point has come up in the public debate, but if it has, then it doesn't seem to be central to it. afaik austerity measures have already been in place for a while, and i doubt that the constitutional reform would change much in that regard. i don't think the proposal has much to do with the eu at all. i think everybody agrees that an overhaul in the italian government (and hopefully a massive "debureaucratization" of the country) is long overdue

it has turned into a eu debate (or at least foreign media coverage makes it look like it has) simply because it's a polarizing issue. it's fertile ground for (often paranoid) fears that "it's designed to give up the sovereignty of the country" and stuff like that, but most importantly, reforming the government is the basis of renzi's platform, and the ones who stand to gain the most from renzi's defeat are the rapidly growing 5 star movement (m5s). m5s have stated that they no longer want italy to leave the eu, and want eu reforms instead, but they do want italy to abandon the euro (which sounds ridiculous to me if they don't even want to leave the eu anyway)

also, unlike the referendum in the uk earlier this year, this one wasn't exactly a deliberate choice. the problem was that the proposal actually was approved (multiple times, apparently) but the majority that approved it wasn't large enough, in which case the law says that a referendum can settle the issue. so it's not so much meant to gauge (and capitalize on) public opinion, as it is a way to finally approve the proposal (or scrap it and put it to rest, which would mean that "renzi's platform / the democratic party's platform has failed")

right now, a mess. completely.
i am italian

Not to mention that the "screw the system" candidate often has major flaws of their own. Look at Trump.