Inside Italy: How Meloni's government is boycotting the citizenship referendum

Local Italy

17-05-2025

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.
With just over three weeks to go until Italy holds a landmark referendum on easing citizenship rules, discussions over the upcoming vote are heating up in Italian media.
One question several political commentators have tried to answer this week is whether the citizenship reform, which proposes to cut the current residency requirement for naturalisation claims from 10 years down to five, stands any chance of passing.
As with all referendums in Italy, the citizenship vote will need a voter turnout of over 50 percent for its result to be valid. If this threshold (or quorum) is not met, the referendum won't be valid, whatever its result may be.
So far, most reports have said that it's unlikely that the citizenship referendum will reach the quorum, noting that voter turnout in referendums has historically been low in Italy.
According to La Pagella Politica, Italians have been called to vote in 29 referendums since 1995, with only four reaching the quorum.
Low voter turnout in recent votes has often been attributed to growing political 'disengagement', as an increasing number of citizens choose to refrain from participating in public life.
But if the upcoming referendum were to fall short of the quorum, shattering hopes of a quicker path to citizenship for around 2.5 million people, it would be hard to pin the outcome on political disaffection alone.
Several members of PM Giorgia Meloni's ruling coalition, which strongly opposes the citizenship reform, have called on supporters to abstain from voting in recent weeks.
Igor Iezzi, an MP from Matteo Salvini's anti-immigration League, said earlier this month that his party's official stance was 'abstention'.
'Our goal is to prevent the quorum from being reached,' he added.
Senate speaker Ignazio La Russa, from PM Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, went even further last week, saying he would "campaign to ensure that people stay home".
La Russa's announcement came amid reports that Brothers of Italy management had sent a memo to party members urging them to promote abstention from the referendum.
The ruling coalition's calls to boycott the vote have sparked outrage among the opposition's ranks, with many accusing the government of undermining citizen participation in public life and deepening political apathy.
Elly Schlein, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, said the government's calls to boycott the vote were a 'betrayal of the constitutional principles that establish voting as a civic duty'.
Similarly, Riccardo Magi, leader of the centre-left +Europa party, said that voting 'is the foundation of democracy' and 'in a normal country, government institutions should do everything to encourage voting'.
So far, the government has responded to critics by saying that encouraging abstention is legitimate under Italian law and that previous left-wing administrations also called on voters to abstain from voting in referendums.
While both points are factually accurate, they leave one fundamental question unanswered: why is the government encouraging its supporters to boycott the referendum?
Some have argued that Meloni's administration may be 'afraid' of losing the head-to-head contest with the broad centre-left coalition backing the citizenship reform.
I see this as unlikely as the government currently enjoys the support of over 45 percent of voters and would have the numbers to overcome the pro-reform bloc.
I believe that, rather than acting out of fear of an electoral face-off with the centre-left coalition, Meloni's government may be trying to smother any semblance of public debate on citizenship.
Calls to change Italy's naturalisation laws, which are among the toughest in Europe, are nothing new, but public discussions on the topic have struggled to gain momentum outside of campaign groups, largely because of deliberate sabotage by the government.
I suspect that the ruling coalition may once again be trying to prevent tens of thousands of citizens from forming well-informed opinions about Italy's citizenship laws – and from realising why they need to change.