When Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni conceded defeat in a March referendum on her signature judicial overhaul, admitting only “regret for a missed opportunity to modernize Italy,” she had lost in large part to a bloc of voters her government has struggled for three years to win over. Italians under 35 turned out at nearly 67%, roughly eight percentage points above the national average, and rejected the reform by a wider margin than the electorate as a whole: 60% opposed compared with 54% among all voters. The result offered the clearest evidence yet of a youth disaffection that polling shows has only deepened since, with national elections due in 2027 shaping up as a close contest between Meloni’s rightist coalition and the center-left opposition.
The referendum asked voters to approve splitting Italy’s unified judiciary into separate career tracks for judges and prosecutors and creating a new disciplinary court with members chosen partly by lottery, a measure Meloni’s government argued would insulate prosecutors from political pressure but which critics said would instead concentrate power in the executive.
Voters rejected it by roughly 54% to 46% on turnout near 59%, a result that exposed how thoroughly younger Italians had turned against a government they had largely just ignored at the ballot box in prior contests. Turnout among under-35s is normally depressed in Italy, with young voters more often expressing dissatisfaction by staying home than by voting against the government, according to polling analysts. The referendum reversed that pattern abruptly, and Meloni had sensed the danger beforehand, appearing on an irreverent podcast hosted by a popular rapper days before the vote in a late bid to reach younger audiences.
The referendum has since become a data point in a broader pattern. Meloni’s coalition, comprising her Brothers of Italy party, Matteo Salvini’s League and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani’s more moderate Forza Italia, now commands less than 30% of voting support among Italians under 35, according to Lorenzo Pregliasco, head of the Youtrend polling agency. That compares with nearly 50% support in the same age bracket for the opposition bloc led by the Democratic Party, the 5-Star Movement and the Left-Green Alliance. At the peak of Meloni’s popularity in 2023, Youtrend data showed her Brothers of Italy party alone drawing roughly as much youth support as her entire three-party coalition attracts today. The government’s overall approval rating among under-35 voters stands at just 25%, compared with 35% across the general population, Youtrend found.
Analysts attribute much of the shift to economic stagnation rather than any single policy misstep. Lorenzo De Sio, a political science professor at Rome’s Luiss University, said Meloni’s government had pursued no significant economic reforms during its time in office, a status quo he said mainly punished those with the least protection from it, including many young people.
Italy’s employment rate among 15- to 24-year-olds is the lowest in the 21-nation euro zone, according to Eurostat, and the country invests less in education than nearly all of its European partners. A young university graduate in Germany earns 80% more on average than an Italian counterpart, the Bank of Italy has found, a gap that continues to push tens of thousands of young Italians abroad each year in search of better prospects. Meloni’s office declined to answer questions from Reuters about the trend.
The government’s law-and-order agenda has compounded the generational rift. Since a 2022 decree cracking down on rave parties, subsequent measures have targeted light cannabis production, disruptive street protests, squatters and juvenile crime, prompting a nationwide student demonstration dubbed “No Meloni Day” last November that drew thousands to protest the security decrees, education spending cuts and Meloni’s stance on the war in Gaza.
A 2023 decree toughening penalties for offending minors has already driven a 50% increase in Italy’s juvenile prison population, according to the prisoners’ rights group Antigone, and the government introduced a bill last month that would treat 14- to 17-year-olds as fully criminally responsible unless proven otherwise, reversing existing rules that require judges to establish a minor understood the implications of their actions. The same government has separately required parental written consent before teenagers can receive sex education in school.
Meloni also faces new competition on her own ideological flank. National Future, a far-right party formed in February by former army general Roberto Vannacci, is polling at roughly 7% nationally, drawing strongest support from middle-aged men but also pulling a notable following among anti-immigrant urban youths drawn to his pledge to return migrants to their countries of origin. “Vannacci is certainly holding up better with young voters than the ruling parties are,” Pregliasco said, a dynamic that threatens to split whatever youth support remains on the Italian right rather than simply ceding it to the opposition.
