Rights campaigners have accused the Italian government of ramping up divisive rhetoric in an attempt to court far-right voters ahead of next year’s general election after it passed a decree aimed at capping the number of newly arrived migrants in classrooms and banning the burqa and niqab in schools.
The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party, said her government had approved what she called “commonsense measures that do not divide but genuinely help to integrate”.
Writing on social media, she added: “A limit of ۳۰% in classrooms for students who do not adequately know Italian, plus tools to learn our language and a halt to burqas and niqabs in school.”
The announcement was a toned-down version of comments she had made earlier in the week at an event organised by Brothers of Italy’s youth division. “It cannot be that in the classroom it is Italian children who feel left out because they’ve become the minority,” Meloni said as she vowed to “legally set the number of foreign students per class”.
Thursday’s decree also sets out that in cases where students show persistent problems with integrating or struggle to learn the language, their parents will be referred to social services and will have to take free literacy and Italian language classes. Failure to comply on the part of parents could result in fines of up to €۱,۰۰۰.
The education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, said the measures, set to take effect in the ۲۰۲۷-۲۸ school year, would affect about ۱,۰۰۰ classrooms, or about ۰.۳% of the total nationwide.
Rights campaigners were swift to link the measures to next year’s election, in which Meloni’s premiership is facing an unexpected challenger on the right.
“She’s creating an emergency that is not a real emergency at all,” said Daniela Ionita, of the campaign group Italians without Citizenship, pointing out that an estimated ۶۰% of the pupils who could be described as foreign were born in Italy but faced a myriad of hurdles when it came to accessing citizenship. “Because there are now new parties pushing from the right, I think Meloni is scared,” she said.
The government said students born and raised in Italy or who had attended at least two years of nursery school or completed three years of schooling in Italy would be exempt from the measures.
Ionita said the ramped-up rhetoric was an attempt by the government to mask how little it had accomplished during its time in power. “If you remove every decree linked to security or to migrants, the government’s political and economic programme will fall apart, and very little concrete remains of one of the longest-serving governments of the last years in Italy,” she said.
Marco Tarchi, a political scientist who focuses on the extreme right and teaches at the University of Florence, said the school measures were “undoubtedly” driven by fears of a new political challenge on the right.
Since February, a new party, Futuro Nazionale (FN), has galvanised the extreme right, with polls suggesting it could capture about ۸% of the vote in an election expected as early as spring ۲۰۲۷.
Led by Roberto Vannacci, a former army general best known for self-publishing a book rife with racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, the party’s popularity in polls has eclipsed that of Brothers of Italy’s two coalition partners, the League and the conservative Forza Italia.
Those who have shifted allegiances include some who had enthusiastically lined up behind Meloni years ago as she spoke of “ethnic substitution” and vowed to install an all-out naval blockade to prevent migrant arrivals from north Africa.
Tarchi said: “Many of the FN’s potential voters are former supporters of Giorgia Meloni’s party who are disappointed that, once in power, the leader softened many of her previous stances regarding the European Union, which she had harshly criticised; immigration, on which she had made radical proposals that were later abandoned; and other issues.”
He said Vannacci had capitalised on this, capturing voters with an extreme manifesto that promised “remigration” and limits on the number of foreigners in the country, as well as curtailing LGBTQ+ rights and negating the right to abortion. He said that in order to win back this support, Meloni could have to adopt positions closer to those she held while in opposition.
A glimpse of what this could look like came this summer when Meloni seized on the sudden entry of tens of thousands of people into the tiny Spanish territory of Ceuta in north Africa, said Elisa De Pieri, a researcher at Amnesty International.
“Meloni immediately exploited the situation in Ceuta, which had absolutely nothing to do with Italy and nothing to do with the Schengen space, but she made it into a supposed crisis for Italy,” she said. “And so that’s the mode that I think we’re going to see in the next months.”
De Pieri predicted that Meloni “won’t be talking too much” about Italy’s offshore detention agreement with Albania on the grounds that it had not been successful as she would have hoped. “It’s been very costly, and it’s been struck down repeatedly by national and international courts,” she said.
Instead, she expects that Meloni will adopt a more aggressive tone on migration more generally, leading to a polarising electoral campaign whose impact would be disproportionately borne among migrant communities.
The view was echoed by critics of the new measures who pointed out the rarity of burqas or niqabs in Italian classrooms and said the government was simply repackaging previous, unenforced policies, given that the ۳۰% threshold was previously floated by the education ministry in ۲۰۱۰. Save the Children said the overall impact would be to “create ‘first-class’ and ‘second-class’ students”.
The leader of the Democratic party, Elly Schlein, described the decree as “shameful” and accused the government of “living on a different planet”. She said Italian parents were grappling with a very different set of issues, citing crumbling school buildings, the high costs of textbooks and low salaries of teachers.
“Faced with all this, the government’s response is to kick foreign children out of the classroom,” Schlein said. “Who do they think they’re kidding? After four years of cuts and no serious investment in school buildings, they’re inventing a witch-hunt that targets the youngest children.”
