Inside Italy: Why government silence is bad news ahead of Italy's citizenship referendum

Local Italy

15-02-2025

Inside Italy is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip from Italy that you might not have heard about. It's published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.
Italian citizenship has been a heavily discussed topic in national media outlets and TV talk shows in recent weeks after the Italian Constitutional Court approved a landmark referendum on easing citizenship by residency rules.
The referendum, which is set to take place on an as-yet-unspecified Sunday between April 15th and June 15th, will ask Italians to decide on whether or not to create a quicker path to naturalisation by cutting the current 10-year wait time down to five years.
This would bring Italy – which is often regarded as having one of the toughest naturalisation systems in Europe – in line with countries such as the UK, France and Germany.
But while a broad centre-left coalition including the Partito Democratico (PD), Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (AVS), Italia Viva and +Europa has recently begun to run a joint campaign in support of the proposed citizenship reform, the ruling hard-right coalition has largely avoided any public mention of the referendum in recent weeks.
Granted, right-wing leaders including PM Giorgia Meloni clearly expressed their opposition to changing current citizenship rules after referendum campaigners secured the signatures needed to qualify for a national vote last September.
But ever since Italy's highest court greenlighted the vote in late January, the forces making up the ruling bloc (Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia, Deputy PM Matteo Salvini's Lega and Antonio Tajani's Forza Italia) have hardly ever touched on the issue in interviews with media or in parliament – and that may well be by design.
Earlier this week, we reported on how the proposed citizenship reform faces two major hurdles, with the first one being the so-called quorum (or 'threshold').
As is the case with all abrogative referendums in Italy, voter turnout will need to exceed 50 percent for the vote's result to be valid. This means that, out of around 51 million eligible voters, over 25.5 million will need to take part in the vote.
If this quorum is not met, the referendum won't be valid, whatever its result may be.
Avoiding (or minimising) public discourse has long been one of the most common political strategies in Italy to keep referendums from reaching the quorum.
In other words, rather than actively campaigning 'against' a certain proposal, parties choose to sidestep the issue altogether, discouraging participation in the vote in a bid to ensure that it doesn't reach the required turnout.
This tactic is often seen by political commentators as partly responsible for the low number of successful referendums held in Italy since the birth of the Republic (only 39 of 77 votes have reached the quorum over the past 50 years).
Over the years, many campaign groups and political experts have called for the repeal of the quorum requirement, asking that referendums' results be taken as valid regardless of voter turnout.
None have been successful so far.
So what does it all mean for the citizenship referendum?
It means that the campaign run by the centre-left coalition will have to 'drown out' the silence of the ruling bloc in order to give the proposed citizenship reform a chance of passing at least the first hurdle – namely the quorum.
Some Italian media reports in recent weeks have said that a miracolo (miracle) is needed for the referendum to reach the required voter turnout.
Plenty of religious miracoli have taken place in Italy over the centuries, at least according to Catholic tradition.
Hopefully, we'll be getting a slightly more secular miracle this spring.