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Italians began voting on Sunday in a referendum on shortening the residency requirement for citizenship — a prospect strongly opposed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government.
The vote — which was initiated by a petition and is backed by opposition parties, labour unions and social activists — aims to repeal a law requiring foreigners from outside the EU to live in Italy 10 years continuously before applying to be naturalised. EU citizens can seek naturalisation after just four years.
If voters back the proposal, foreigners without Italian ancestry could apply for citizenship after five years, bringing the country’s immigration rules in line with Germany and France. About half of Italy’s 5.4mn foreign residents could be eligible to apply for citizenship immediately, proponents say.
However, analysts expect turnout to fall short of the required threshold — 50 per cent of eligible voters, plus one — to be binding. Meloni’s government has urged its supporters to abstain in the two-day vote, hoping to sink the referendum through low engagement by the time polls close on Monday afternoon.
“Only a tiny proportion of the population will show up at the polls,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco, founder of Youtrend, a political polling agency. “You will have a majority of those people voting Yes. But it’s very, very likely that the turnout will be below 50 per cent.”
Meloni said on June 5 that she would visit a polling station as a “sign of respect” given her role as prime minister, but not cast a vote on a measure with which she profoundly disagrees.
“I am totally against halving the time required to apply for citizenship,” she told a forum organised by rightwing newspaper La Verità. “The citizenship law in Italy is excellent and very open. We have long been among the European nations that grant the highest number of citizenships each year.”
However, Meloni said Rome could reduce processing times for submitted citizenship applications, which take up to three years to approve.
“Speeding up the bureaucratic process once you have the right to access citizenship is a different matter,” she said. “It is something that interests us, and we are working on it.”
More than 788,000 foreign migrants, and their 567,330 minor children, acquired Italian citizenship between 2011 and 2023 based on their years living in the country.
In that period, another 92,000 youth born and raised in Italy by migrant parents were naturalised after reaching their 18th birthday.
Between 2016 to 2023, Italy also granted citizenship to more than 98,300 people, mostly living overseas especially in Latin America, based on their claims of Italian ancestry.
However, Rome has tightened rules for awarding citizenship through descent, following concerns about fraud and the surge in Latin Americans using newly acquired Italian passports to travel to the US and elsewhere.
Italy is confronting one of Europe’s most acute demographic crises. Its population is ageing rapidly, with about a quarter of Italians over 65 years old and just 12 per cent aged 14 or younger.
Foreigners now account for 11 per cent of all students in Italian schools, and 13.5 per cent of last year’s new births were foreigners.
