20 Luglio 2025
Luna Katrina Vriends
Who Gets to Belong? Citizenship, Labour, and the Quiet Defeat of the 2025 Referendums
The referenda held in Italy on 8 and 9 June, 2025, were not simply invalidated, they were culturally erased. Framed around four proposals to strengthen labour protections and one to reform citizenship law, these initiatives never truly entered widespread public debate. With turnout stagnating just above 30%, none of the five proposals reached the 50% quorum required for legal validity. But behind the formal failure lies something deeper: a quiet politics of reticence that seems carefully engineered to preserve a narrow and exclusionary vision of what it means to be Italian.
Surprisingly, the most politically charged question, namely reducing the residency requirement for naturalisation from ten to five years, was never openly contested in mainstream discourse other than being labeled and then left to die. In a media landscape heavily shaped by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s influence, institutional silence became an instrument of control. Whilst the government said little, the message was clear: in the absence of state-led debate or public information campaigns, the referendum was destined to fail, not because it was rejected, but because it was never allowed a chance to succeed.
This was not apathy, but rather strategy. The question of citizenship was not answered but buried instead, and in its place, the myth of a fixed, homogeneous Italian identity remained untouched. And so belonging was not understood as a right to be extended, but a status to be defended. Whether this outcome was deliberately designed or passively allowed remains an open question, but the consequences were the same: the status quo remained intact, practically untouched by public justification, debate or interrogation.
In Italian referendums, a quorum, namely the required turnout of at least half the electorate plus one, is needed for the outcome to be binding. Although the practice is formally a safeguard of democratic legitimacy, in today’s Italy the quorum increasingly functions as a conservative buffer. In a context where abstention invalidates reform just as effectively as a “no” vote, silence becomes an ally of power. Without institutional efforts to inform the public or facilitate civic engagement, the failure to meet the quorum may reflect not disengagement, but the quiet success of a system that rewards inaction.
Still, it would be misleading to reduce the referendum’s failure solely to non-participation. Among those who did vote, the citizenship question drew more than five million votes against, that is over one-third of all ballots cast. In contrast, the labour-related proposals encountered far less resistance. This divergence signals something important: that the question of citizenship, far from being a mere administrative matter, touches a core symbolic terrain, one shaped by misapprehension and anxiety around culture, migration, and national identity.
Yet the tendency to treat citizenship and labour as separate spheres is misleading. It has been questioned why four labour-related questions were bundled with a fifth on citizenship. One may go further, suggesting that this design may have been politically expedient, or even manipulative, as combining them implied taking the risk of diluting attention and confusing narratives. And given the symbolic volatility of the citizenship question, one must wonder whether it was included not despite its political weight, but because of it.
However, the truth is that citizenship and labour are fundamentally intertwined. To grant citizenship is not merely to recognize someone as part of a national identity, it is to extend rights: to healthcare, education, welfare, and, crucially, access to a labour market governed by protections rather than precarity.
For immigrants without citizenship, structural vulnerability is not the exception, but the rule. Uncertain legal status often translates into precarious work, short-term contracts, and increased exposure to exploitation, conditions that, in some cases, approach modern forms of servitude.
Arguably, the citizenship referendum was not a question of identity, but of granting dignity and sharing community. It did not only ask whether one “feels Italian,” but whether the state is willing to grant rights to those who contribute to its economy, who live in its neighbourhoods, whose children attend its schools. ‘Italianità’ (Italian-ness), in this light, should not be measured by heritage or descent, but by the willingness to share in a project of collective rights and responsibilities, where the question of citizenship is a question about labour rights.
In the end, the referendums failed not because the public collectively and decisively rejected change, but because political institutions refused to facilitate meaningful engagement. Silence, abstention, and the careful management of narrative created a landscape in which progressive reform had no air to breathe. And nowhere was this more evident than in the treatment of citizenship, a question about rights, dignity, and access to the most basic protections a democracy can offer.
Italy missed an opportunity, not just to reform its laws, but to ask itself what kind of nation it wants to be. Whether Italianità remains a nostalgic fiction or evolves into something more inclusive and democratic is a question that has yet to be answered; if this referendum revealed anything, it is that it will not be settled by silence.