Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced her government will soon introduce legislation limiting the number of foreign students per classroom and banning burqas and niqabs in schools, measures she framed as protecting Italian children and defending gender equality.
Meloni made the announcement Sunday at the Fenix festival, the annual national youth gathering organized by Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of her Brothers of Italy party. Speaking to student supporters, she laid out a three-pronged legislative package: a hard cap on foreign students in each classroom, a ban on full-face coverings in schools, and a new requirement that parents of foreign students who are struggling to integrate must learn Italian.
The prime minister did not hold back about why. As Breitbart News reported, Meloni told the crowd:
"It's unthinkable that in an Italian classroom, Italian children feel cornered because they've become the minority. It can't be done."
On the face-covering ban, she was equally direct. Meloni cast the measure not as cultural hostility but as a non-negotiable principle of women's rights:
"We go to school with our faces uncovered, and in Italy, no one, in the name of a real or presumed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide. Gender equality is non-negotiable."
The legislation will go through Italy's Council of Ministers, though Meloni offered no specific timeline beyond "soon" and no details on the exact cap number or percentage of foreign students per classroom.
These school-level measures arrive against a broader backdrop. Since taking office, Meloni has pursued an aggressive posture on illegal immigration, and the results have been tangible. Illegal immigration via the Mediterranean boat migrant route has dropped considerably during her tenure, though specific figures were not cited.
During her 2022 election campaign, Meloni floated the idea of deploying the Italian Navy to prevent people smugglers and NGO boats from operating in the Mediterranean. That proposal drew fierce criticism at the time. But Meloni has since shifted her focus toward building EU-level consensus on migration, a strategy that has produced concrete, if contested, results.
Rome attempted to establish a third-party asylum processing center in Albania, a unilateral arrangement that was blocked by legal challenges at home and at the European Union level. Rather than abandon the concept, Meloni's party in the European Parliament spearheaded efforts over the summer to provide a legal basis for third-party country asylum centers. She has since partnered with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and multiple other EU member states to establish the first such center, though the specific partner countries have not been disclosed.
Meloni also negotiated with Egypt and Tunisia to clamp down on human trafficking networks in exchange for favorable trade terms, the details of which remain undisclosed.
Not everyone on the Italian right thinks Meloni is moving fast enough. Roberto Vannacci, a former Italian Army general who founded the Futuro Nazionale party, responded to the Sunday announcements by saying he "absolutely agrees" with the proposals but that they should have "come years ago." Vannacci's party campaigns on a platform focused on returning migrants to their countries of origin.
That pressure from the right is politically relevant. Meloni recently earned the distinction of leading the longest-serving government in post-war Italy, and next year's elections loom as a test of whether her coalition can hold together. Proposals like the classroom cap and the burqa ban serve a dual purpose: they address a real policy concern about integration in Italian schools, and they shore up her flank against critics who argue she has been too incremental.
The least-discussed piece of the package may be the most practically significant. Meloni's proposal would require parents of foreign students who are struggling to integrate to learn Italian. The legislation does not appear to define "struggling to integrate", at least not in any detail made public so far, and the enforcement mechanism remains unclear.
But the principle is straightforward: if a family's child is falling behind in an Italian school, the government expects the parents to meet the country halfway. That is not a radical demand. It is the kind of common-sense expectation that most nations once took for granted before the political class decided that asking immigrants to assimilate was somehow impolite.
Meloni is betting that voters, in Italy and across Europe, still believe a country has the right to set the terms of its own classrooms. Given the trajectory of European politics, that bet looks sound.
