Italy's Meloni plans to cap foreign students in classrooms

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wants to limit the proportion of foreign children in school classrooms. However, she appears to have overlooked the reality on the ground in schools.

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is now taking a stand against discrimination—specifically, what she claims is the discrimination of Italian children in the country’s schools.

“It is unacceptable that in an Italian classroom, Italian children find themselves pushed into a corner because they have become a minority,” she declared on Sunday in Rome, speaking at the youth organization festival of her party, Fratelli d’Italia (FdI).

The post-fascist leader intends to follow her words with immediate action. The Council of Ministers is expected to pass a legislative decree on Thursday that would introduce a cap on the proportion of foreign students in classrooms. Additionally, burkas and niqabs would be banned in schools. Parents of foreign children struggling with language difficulties would also be required to attend Italian language courses.

Meloni can claim at least one immediate success with this “integration” initiative: she secured the lead story on all TV news broadcasts on Sunday and the front-page headlines of all daily newspapers on Monday. However, readers could also find, for example, an interview with a school principal from Rome whose school has a high proportion of foreign children, many from Islamic countries. The principal noted that she had “never” had students wearing burkas or niqabs.

The composition of classrooms is a more tangible issue. Of approximately 8 million students in the country, 930,000 children hold only a foreign passport. Two-thirds of them, however, were born and raised in Italy, and many have been in the Italian school system since kindergarten. If Giorgia Meloni had seriously wanted to understand their situation, she could have visited, for instance, the Scuola Pisacane in the heavily migrant-influenced Roman district of Torpignatara.

Meloni Eyes Competition from the Far-Right Fringe

Children from around 20 nations attend the kindergarten and primary school there. No one is talking about capping the foreign student ratio—quite the opposite: the school is now highly sought after even by Italian parents. Children struggling with Italian receive intensive support, and school life is organized as an international community, with collaboration between the teaching staff and the parents’ association.

However, strengthening such realities is not the right-wing leader’s goal. With an eye on the upcoming 2027 elections, she faces a different problem: stiff competition on the far-right flank of her coalition, following the founding of the new party Futuro Nazionale (FN – National Future) by former paratrooper general Roberto Vannacci.

The general, who is allied with Germany’s AfD in Europe, claims that Meloni’s right-wing faction has become “watered down.” He preaches the remedy of “remigration” for dealing with migrants day in and day out. His party, founded only in February, has already reached 8 percent in the polls, largely at the expense of the right-wing governing parties. Matteo Salvini’s xenophobic Lega has slumped to 5 percent, and even Meloni’s FdI, which once polled at 30 percent in better times, now stands at only 25–26 percent.

Reactions are not long in coming. At the Lega’s annual rally in Pontida, northern Italy, last Sunday, the motto was: “Non passa lo straniero” (“The foreigner shall not pass”), a line from a World War I soldier’s song.

Meloni cannot afford to be absent from this fight for the supposedly marginalized Italian students. Yet, in her speech, she did not utter a single word about an incident that shook Italy last week. A 13-year-old native Italian boy, who frequented violent supremacist web forums, attacked his teacher with a knife in the classroom. He was stopped by a classmate of Congolese origin.