2025 Italian referendum

The 2025 Italian referendum, officially the 2025 Abrogative Referendums in Italy (Italian: Referendum abrogativi in Italia del 2025), were held on 8 and 9 June, concurrently with the second round of the local elections. The objective of the referendums was the repeal of four labor laws, two of which were originally introduced as part of the Jobs Act in 2016, and an amendment to the law on the acquisition of Italian citizenship by foreign residents.

The referendum question on the request for Italian citizenship was initially promoted by the More Europe secretary Riccardo Magi, as well as by the parties Possibile, Italian Socialist Party, Italian Radicals, and Communist Refoundation Party, and numerous civil society associations, with a collection of signatures, also carried out digitally, which collected more than 637,000 signatures. The referendum questions on work were promoted by the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) with a public collection of signatures, which gathered over four million signatures.

All five questions were declared admissible by the Constitutional Court during the council chamber of 20 January 2025, in which instead the proposal for a referendum to repeal the Calderoli law on differentiated autonomy was rejected and declared inadmissible. For the result to be valid, at least 50% + 1 eligible voters quorum had to be reached with at least 50% of participants approving. As none of the referendums reached the required turnout, the results were consequently rendered void.

Referendum initiative

Referendum on labour

After numerous strikes and demonstrations against the labour reform introduced by the Jobs Act in March 2014 by the Renzi government, in 2016 the CGIL launched a campaign to collect signatures to carry out a referendum to restore the protections of Article 18 of the Workers' Statute for unlawful dismissals and extend them to all companies with at least five employees: this article, which provided for the reinstatement of the worker in the workplace in the case of unlawful dismissal, had been amended in 2015 by the Jobs Act, which instead provided for economic compensation. The CGIL managed to collect 3.3 million signatures throughout Italy; however, on 11 January 2017 the Constitutional Court declared the referendum question inadmissible because it had also been badly formulated in a proactive manner in order to extend the protection of Article 18 to companies with fewer than 15 employees. Further questions concerning the abolition of work vouchers and the repeal of the provisions limiting joint and several liability in the field of contracting were instead admitted by the Constitutional Court, so the date of 28 May 2017 was set for the abrogative referendums to be held; however, the Gentiloni government urgently approved Decree-Law no.