Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said her government will introduce legislation to limit the number of foreign students in classrooms and ban full-face coverings in schools.
Appearing on Sunday at the Fenix, the annual national youth festival organised by Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, told her student supporters that Italian children should not become a minority in their own classrooms.
“It’s unthinkable that in an Italian classroom, Italian children feel cornered because they’ve become the minority. It can’t be done,” she said, according to Corriere della Sera.
The Italian premier said her Council of Ministers would therefore “soon introduce a law on the maximum number of foreign students in classes.”
Meloni said that this would be paired with a “requirement” for parents of foreign students struggling to integrate to learn Italian. The legislation would additionally impose a ban on burqas and niqabs in schools, she declared, saying that it is a “question of civilisation”.
“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,” she added.
Meloni, who recently earned the distinction of having the longest-serving government in post-war Italy, appears intent on shoring up her position on immigration prior to next year’s elections.
Although she has demonstrated some success in preventing illegal immigration via the Mediterranean boat migrant route, which has dropped considerably during her tenure, critics have accused her of failing to live up to her tough rhetoric during the election in 2022, when she floated the idea of deploying the Navy to prevent people smugglers and open-border NGO boats from operating in the region.
Meloni has instead focused on trying to build international consensus at the European Union level to combat the migrant crisis, including by spearheading negotiations with the likes of Egypt and Tunisia to clamp down on human trafficking groups operating in their midst in exchange for favourable trade terms.
Her government has also been at the forefront of the move towards establishing third-party country asylum centres, which would allow for illegal migrants to be immediately removed, rather than allowing them to remain on EU soil while their asylum claims are processed.
While Rome had sought to unilaterally establish such a system with Albania, Meloni’s efforts were blocked by legal challenges at home and at the European Union level. However, over the summer, Meloni’s party in the European Parliament spearheaded efforts to provide a legal basis for such a plan.
At present, Meloni is partnering with Denmark’s Mette Freidrickson, alongside multiple other EU member states, to establish the first such third-party centre.
Still, the Italian PM faces pressure from the right at home, with former Italian Army general Roberto Vannacci establishing the Futuro Nazionale party to campaign on a strict remigration platform.
Responding to the measures announced by Meloni on Sunday, Vannacci said that he “absolutely agrees” with them but said they should have “come years ago.”
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