Two of the three parties in Italy's governing coalition put forward measures targeting foreigners and naturalised citizens on the same Wednesday. The lower house voted 148 to 99 to fast track a bill from the League, first tabled in October 2024, while Brothers of Italy presented its own text on rights the same day.
The shared object is the power to revoke citizenship from naturalised Italians. It exists today, and it is rarely used: it can be exercised only in cases connected to terrorism or insurgency. Both bills would widen the grounds well beyond that.
Sara Kelany, immigration chief for Brothers of Italy, said her party would extend the grounds to all the most serious offences, listing murder, mass murder, kidnapping and offences linked to the Mafia. Riccardo Molinari, the League's group leader in the lower house, said his party wanted to strip citizenship from those who stab, those who kill and those who rape.
Two bills from two coalition partners on the same day is a competition, not a plan, and the parliamentary arithmetic is only the first hurdle. Any widening of revocation runs into the constitutional problem that a naturalised citizen and a citizen by birth are supposed to hold the same status. That is the question the drafting has to answer before the politics of it matters.