'Stay home': Italy's government boycotts 'dangerous' citizenship vote
In a little over two weeks' time, Italians will be called to vote in a referendum on whether to ease the rules on applying for residency-based Italian citizenship by halving the current wait time of 10 years of legal residency down to five.
The vote requires a turnout of over 50 percent to be valid; if this quorum, or threshold, isn't met, the referendum won't count, regardless of the result.
Based on recent trends, the chances of reaching the threshold don't look good: of 29 referendums held in Italy since 1995, only four have reached a quorum.
And if Italy's right-wing coalition government has its way, this one won't be the fifth.
While PM Giorgia Meloni has so far remained silent on the issue, Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, from her Brothers of Italy party, has said he would "campaign to ensure that people stay home."
His announcement came amid reports that Brothers of Italy leadership had sent a memo to party members urging them to promote a boycott of the referendum.
Meanwhile Igor Iezzi, an MP from Deputy PM Matteo Salvini's anti-immigration League party, said earlier this month that abstention was his party's official position, adding, "our goal is to prevent the quorum from being reached."
Salvini himself has simply said he'll be going to the beach instead of voting – a U-turn from his stance in the lead up to a 2022 referendum on reforming Italy's justice system, when he equated abstaining with "giving up".
That referendum, which was personally championed by Salvini, ended up drawing a historically low voter turnout of just 21 percent.
The government has responded to outrage from members of the opposition by arguing that abstention is legitimate under Italian law and that previous left-wing administrations also called on voters to abstain from voting in referendums.
Those claims aren't untrue: according to political fact-checking site Pagella Politica, in 1999 Italy's centre-left government called on people to either vote no or abstain from voting in a referendum on reforming an electoral law.
So (despite reports to the contrary) it's apparently not unprecedented for an Italian government to encourage its own citizens not to vote - though MP Riccardo Magi, leader of the centre-left +Europa party, has said it's not something a "normal country" ought to be doing.
'Giving citizenship away'
The government is against the referendum on the grounds that a yes vote would make it too easy for foreigners to acquire citizenship, arguing that Italy already confers citizenship on more people every year than most other European countries.
Salvini in particular has called the proposal "dangerous", saying it would "give citizenship away".
Opposition leaders like Magi argue that this is untrue, and that the reform would simply make things slightly easier for legal residents who are nonetheless still required to demonstrate that they pay taxes, have no criminal record and speak Italian.
While many of The Local's readers have said that a yes vote would change their lives for the better, they aren't the only group who stands to benefit.
One of the main organisations backing the proposal is Italiani senza cittadinanza ('Italians without citizenship'), a movement that has long campaigned to introduce ius soli birthright citizenship in Italy.
As things stand, people born to foreign parents in Italy can only apply for citizenship at the age of 18, on condition of having legally lived there "without interruption".
If they don't apply before turning 19, they must (like all candidates for naturalisation) demonstrate 10 years of legal residency, then wait up to three years for their application to be approved.
Easing this requirement is something Italy's 'centre-right' parties – currently formed of the ruling coalition of the Brothers of Italy, League, and Forza Italia, who came to power in 2022 on a platform of clamping down on 'illegal' immigration – have long stood against.
But Italiani senza cittadinanza argue that the majority of Italians are in favour of changing the system, pointing to a recent survey that found that just over half of voters support lowering the residency requirement from 10 to five years.
"It personally took me 19 long years to get citizenship," Italian actress and writer Tezetà Abraham told Internazionale magazine in a recent interview. "This would lower the parameters for applying by no small amount."
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