PM Meloni said she would not vote, and opposition accuses government of dampening interest in immigrant, worker issues.
An Italian referendum on easing citizenship rules and strengthening labour protections has failed after hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni encouraged voters to boycott the vote.
As polls closed on Monday, it emerged that many citizens had heeded Meloni’s call as only 30 percent of the electorate cast their ballots over two days of voting, far short of the 50 percent plus one needed to make the result legally binding.
The outcome was a clear defeat for the centre-left opposition, which had proposed to halve the period of residence required to apply for Italian citizenship from 10 to five years and to reverse labour market liberalisations introduced a decade ago.
The prime minister said she was “absolutely against” the citizenship proposals, announcing she would turn up at the polls but not cast a vote.
A stated goal of Meloni’s government is to cut irregular immigration, but it has increased the number of immigrant work visas.
The general secretary of the Italian General Confederation of Labour union, Maurizio Landini, slammed the low turnout as a sign of a “clear democratic crisis” in Italy.
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“We knew it wouldn’t be a walk in the park,” he said, stressing that millions of Italians had turned up to fight for change.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party posted on social media that the “only real goal” of the referendum was to bring down the Meloni government, and it added, alongside pictures of opposition leaders: “In the end, it was the Italians who brought you down.”
Opinion polls published in mid-May showed that 46 percent of Italians were aware of the issues driving the referendums.
Activists and opposition parties accused the governing coalition of deliberately dampening interest in sensitive issues that directly affect immigrants and workers.
Campaigners for the change in the citizenship law said it would help the children of non-European Union parents better integrate into a culture they already see as theirs.
Changes to the laws would have affected about 2.5 million foreign nationals.
Other questions in the referendum dealt with labour-related issues like better protections against dismissal, higher severance payments and the conversion of fixed-term contracts into permanent ones.
Opposition forces had hoped that promoting these causes would help them woo working class voters and challenge Meloni, something they have struggled to do since she came to power in 2022.
Many of the 78 referendums held in Italy in the past have failed due to low turnout.