Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has reignited a contentious political battle over citizenship rights, pushing for expanded powers to revoke naturalized citizenship from foreign-born residents convicted of serious crimes including rape, murder, armed robbery, and drug trafficking. The proposal, currently under debate in the Chamber of Deputies' Constitutional Affairs Committee, would fundamentally alter the terms of Italy's citizenship compact—transforming it from a permanent legal status into what Salvini describes as a "revocable act of trust."
Why This Matters
• Legal expansion: Current law allows citizenship revocation only for terrorism offenses; the new proposal would extend this to rape, murder, robbery, and other violent crimes.
• Who's affected: Only naturalized citizens and those holding residence permits would face revocation—not Italian-born citizens convicted of identical crimes.
• Timeline: The bill, sponsored by parliamentarian Igor Iezzi, is under review in committee, with no clear path to floor vote yet.
The "Driving License" Model for Citizenship
Speaking on RTL 102.5 radio, the Italy Transport Minister and League party leader framed citizenship as conditional, not irrevocable. "We are one of the countries that grants the most citizenships in absolute terms, competing with Spain," Salvini stated. "A large portion of recipients truly deserve it, but a small share do not deserve the trust and money Italians have invested through residence permits and naturalization."
He likened the proposal to a points-based driving license system, where severe violations trigger automatic revocation. "If I grant a residence permit or citizenship to someone who then rapes, kills, or deals drugs, do I have the right to reconsider that act of trust—or not?" he argued, responding to criticism from opposition parties and left-leaning media outlets.
The statement followed a highly publicized incident in Modena, where an individual was accused of attempting a mass casualty attack. Salvini used the case to underscore what he termed the "failure of second-generation integration," claiming that some foreign-born Italians show no intent to assimilate. "Yesterday a North African boarded a train with a machete. Is everything just psychological distress? We need a remedy," he added.
What the Law Says Now—And What Could Change
Italy's existing legal framework for citizenship revocation is narrow. The 2018 Security Decree (Law 132/2018), passed during Salvini's tenure as Interior Minister, allows the government to strip naturalized citizenship only in cases involving terrorism or subversion of the constitutional order. The process requires a presidential decree, proposed by the Interior Ministry, within three years of a final criminal conviction.
Recent legislative developments have begun to broaden this scope:
• Decree-Law 36/2025 (converted into Law 74/2025) introduced revocation powers for mafia association, human trafficking, slavery, and sexual violence against minors. Critically, it also permits revocation based on intelligence agency findings of "hostile behavior toward the state," even absent a criminal conviction—a provision that civil liberties advocates argue violates the presumption of innocence enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
• The 2024 Security Bill extends the revocation window from three to ten years post-conviction and clarifies that revocation cannot be applied if it would render the person stateless, in line with the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Italy ratified in 2015.
Salvini's current proposal would go further, explicitly adding rape, murder, armed robbery, and large-scale drug trafficking to the list of revocable offenses. The change would affect only those who acquired citizenship through marriage, naturalization, or declaration at age 18—not citizens by birth.
Crime Data and the Immigration Debate
The proposal arrives amid heightened public concern over crime statistics. While foreign nationals—both legal and irregular—represent roughly 9-10% of Italy's population, they account for a disproportionate share of certain offense categories:
• In 2022, foreign suspects represented 45.5% of those charged with theft and 47.3% of robbery cases.
• Nearly 30% of Italy's prison population is foreign-born, with irregular migrants vastly overrepresented relative to their share of the overall population.
• For sexual violence offenses recorded in the first three quarters of 2024, 44% of suspects were foreign nationals; among young offenders, that figure rose to nearly 60%.
Legal experts note that irregular migrants—estimated at less than 1% of Italy's total population—commit a disproportionate share of crimes attributed to foreigners. Studies suggest their relative crime rate is roughly 50 times higher than that of EU citizens. This disparity is driven partly by legal barriers: undocumented residents cannot access alternatives to detention, such as house arrest, due to lack of registered housing.
Impact on Residents: What Could Actually Change
If this proposal becomes law, the practical consequences for foreign-born Italians would be dramatic. If you are a naturalized Italian citizen convicted of rape, murder, or armed robbery, you could lose your citizenship—even though an Italian-born citizen convicted of the exact same crime would keep theirs. This would apply regardless of how long you've held citizenship or how integrated you are into Italian society.
For residence permit holders, the consequences could be even swifter. Your permit can already be revoked administratively, and this proposal would make that process simpler for serious criminal convictions. Neither naturalized citizens nor permit holders would necessarily have the right to a dedicated hearing before revocation, or the opportunity for judicial review before the Interior Ministry's proposal reaches the President for final approval.
For Italy's 5.2 million legal foreign residents and the estimated 680,000 naturalized citizens over the past decade, this represents a fundamental shift in security. Naturalized citizenship, once permanent, would become provisional—subject to retroactive review based on future conduct. Legal residency and citizenship, long presented as pathways to integration and stability, would carry an implicit "good behavior" clause extending years beyond the initial grant.
Constitutional and European Legal Hurdles
This proposal faces significant legal obstacles that experts argue could render it unconstitutional or violate European human rights law. The core problem: Italian-born citizens convicted of the same crimes would retain full citizenship rights, while naturalized citizens would not. This asymmetry likely violates Article 3 of the Italian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law.
European courts have already signaled concerns about similar measures:
• The 2010 Rottmann ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union established that while member states control citizenship policy, revocation must respect proportionality and EU citizenship rights.
• The European Court of Human Rights has held that arbitrary citizenship revocation can breach Article 8 of the Convention (right to private and family life), particularly when it results in statelessness or severe disruption to family ties.
• Italy's 1961 Statelessness Convention obligations prohibit creating stateless persons, a constraint acknowledged in the 2024 Security Bill but difficult to enforce in practice when the individual's country of origin refuses to recognize their nationality.
Legal challenges are virtually certain if this bill passes—either through Italy's Constitutional Court or via appeal to European human rights tribunals.
Political Battle Lines
Opposition parties have condemned the initiative as political theater designed to distract from policy failures. Riccardo Magi, leader of the centrist Più Europa party, accused Salvini of exploiting the Modena incident as an "electoral ATM," noting that the suspect in question is already an Italian citizen by birth, rendering the revocation debate irrelevant to that case.
Filiberto Zaratti of the Greens and Left Alliance criticized Salvini's approach as "scandalous" opportunism, arguing that the focus should be on integration policy and crime prevention, not punitive citizenship measures.
The debate also touches on broader migration policy. Salvini has repeatedly argued that Italy's permissive citizenship regime—which granted over 1.3 million citizenships between 2012 and 2022, the second-highest total in the EU after Spain—requires stricter gatekeeping. His critics counter that conflating naturalized citizens with irregular migrants stigmatizes integrated communities and undermines social cohesion.
Parallel Move on Fuel Taxes
In a separate policy announcement on the same broadcast, Salvini confirmed that the government will extend the current excise tax reduction on diesel and gasoline, a measure set to expire at the end of May. The tax cut, worth roughly €0.25 per liter, has provided modest relief to consumers but limited benefit to the commercial trucking sector, which faces razor-thin margins amid rising operational costs.
The Italy Transport Ministry plans to introduce a new tax credit mechanism for freight operators, allocating "several hundred million euros" to offset losses. The move follows threats of a nationwide trucking strike scheduled for the week of May 26. Salvini criticized the European Commission for inaction, comparing Brussels to "a doctor who sees a seriously ill patient but waits until they're critical before intubating them."
What Comes Next
The citizenship revocation bill remains in committee, with no scheduled vote. Its passage would require approval from both chambers of Parliament and presidential signature, a process that could take months. Legal challenges are virtually certain, either through Italy's Constitutional Court or via appeal to European human rights tribunals.
For now, the debate underscores a broader tension in Italian society: how to balance integration, public safety, and the rule of law in an era of heightened migration and shifting demographics. Whether the proposal advances or stalls, it has already reshaped the political discourse around citizenship—casting it not as a fundamental right, but as a privilege contingent on conduct.
