The Italian government on Thursday approved rules capping the number of students without Italian citizenship in each classroom at 30%, as well as banning burqas and niqabs.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni first announced her plans to implement such rules on Sunday during a gathering of her conservative Brothers of Italy party in Rome.
The 30% cap will take effect in the 2027-28 school year and will apply to primary and secondary school classrooms. In primary schools, the cap will apply to non-Italian citizens who were not born in Italy or who did not attend at least two years of preschool. For secondary schools, the threshold applies to students without Italian citizenship who did not complete three years in the country’s school system.
If schools have more students than allowed by the threshold, education officials will have to move students to nearby schools, but the legislation did not specify how that practice would be done.
Meloni said when introducing the cap that the law was a response to Italian students beginning to feel like a “minority” in the country’s classrooms.
The government also approved a ban on face coverings. The ban would apply to the burqa, which covers the entire body and face, and the niqab, which covers the face while leaving the eyes visible, both of which are often associated with strict adherence to Islam. Meloni and her party said the attire is a symbol of Islamist oppression and disrespects women’s dignity.
The ban does not apply to hijabs, because the head covering leaves the face visible.
“You must go to school with your face uncovered, and in Italy no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself,” Meloni said on Sunday.
The council-approved law directs that anyone who violates the face-covering ban be fined 1,000 euros.
Italy already has laws addressing face coverings. A 1975 rule generally prohibits people from wearing clothing or other items that hide their identity without a justified reason. A 2008 ruling clarified that religious or cultural reasons can justify a face covering as long as the person removes it when necessary for identification.
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Meloni has said the actions were “common sense tools,” but the opposition accused her party of playing into culture war politics as her party trails the centrist Democratic Party in the country. The measure is backed by the hard-right National Future party, from which Meloni will need support in next year’s general election.
Migration has remained a major political issue in Italy, which is one of the principal entry ports into Europe for migrants from the Mediterranean. Students without Italian citizenship account for roughly 11.6% of the school population.