Foreign residents in Italy would need to wait 20 years to qualify for citizenship through residency, double the current ten, under proposals published on Tuesday by the Futuro Nazionale (National Future, or FN) party, which many speculate could play a key role in the formation of the next government.

The party, formed in February by disgraced former army general Roberto Vannacci after a split with Matteo Salvini’s League, already polls ahead of the League at 7 percent and is pushing the ruling parties to announce harder lines on citizenship policy in a scramble for anti-immigration votes.

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Vannacci wants to increase the required level of Italian language capability to C1, two levels above the B1 currently required, demanding near-fluency rather than everyday conversational ability.

The proposal also says applicants should sign a declaration of “assimilation to Greco-Roman and Christian civilisation” and must demonstrate “honourable conduct”, without defining what exactly either would involve.

The manifesto entirely rules out Ius soli and ius scholae, the long-proposed reforms that would let children born or educated in Italy claim citizenship regardless of their parents’ status.

The citizenship changes sit within Vannacci's wider deportation or “remigration” plan, centred on building more detention centres in Italy and abroad, as well as closing ports for NGO rescue vessels, ending the decreto flussi work-permit quota system, and restricting family reunification to narrow exceptions.

Futuro Nazionale also said it wants to repeal the Mancino law, one of Italy’s two main laws used against fascism. The 1993 law made it a crime to spread ideas of racial or ethnic superiority, or incite discrimination or violence on racial, ethnic, national or religious grounds.

It is rarely enforced, and convictions are hard to secure. Prosecutors turned to it after hundreds of people performed the fascist salute in Rome in January 2024, when Italy’s top court ruled that the salute alone did not breach Italy’s little-used anti-fascism law.

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The party emphasised that it wants to abolish femicide as an offence, undoing a law Meloni’s own government introduced less than a year ago, as part of its push for a more patriarchal society.

Italy made femicide a separate crime from homicide in November 2025, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, after years of high-profile killings including the 2023 murder of 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin by her former boyfriend, a case that triggered mass protests and forced femicide onto the political agenda. Meloni called the law a tool to “defend the freedom and dignity of every woman.”

Futuro Nazionale said the crime should be handled as ordinary homicide, suggesting the separate offence would not be needed under what it called a “Mediterranean patriarchy” built around “strong men, capable of dominating their emotions and passions.” Campaigners and lawmakers have spent years working to remove delitto passionale (‘crime of passion’) defences from Italian courtrooms and news coverage as a way of excusing men who kill women.

Democratic Party senator Filippo Sensi called the proposal “a macabre joke”. His colleague Valeria Valente, who chaired parliament’s inquiry commission on femicide and gender violence, described it as “a delirium of male supremacism” and “a delirious, anti-constitutional, fascist-style theory.”

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Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni dismissed Vannacci’s entire project in an interview with weekly magazine Chi, published on Wednesday, calling it “an operation built to help the left.” She did not comment on the specific proposals.

There has been widespread speculation that Meloni would be willing to join forces with Vannacci after her own MPs voted for FN’s amendment to her electoral reform bill last month. The League and Forza Italia had rejected it, with Brothers of Italy lawmakers explicitly describing the vote with FN as a message to its coalition partners.

As FN overtook the League in the polls, both Brothers of Italy and the League put forward their own bills in July expanding the grounds for stripping citizenship from naturalised Italians, within hours of each other. Opposition lawmakers said at the time that the two parties were “chasing National Future on who is more racist” as they feared losing more votes ahead of the 2027 election.