The immigration issue in the Italian general elections

After the Draghi government fell on July 20, 2022, early elections for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic were held on September 25, 2022. In reality, the elections were moved up by only a few months, as the parliamentary term that had begun in 2018 was slated to end in the spring of 2023. In this chapter, we will analyze the political platforms of the major parties and coalitions that ran for election, seeking to shed light on certain features of the immigration issue that have long been constants for the Italian party system, as well as several peculiarities that were typical of this round of voting. As we will see in the first section, the issue figures in all of the platforms, though the interpretations and proposals naturally differ from party to party and even within coalitions and electoral alliances. However, in the September 25, 2022 elections, all of the parties assigned less weighth specifically to the immigration issue than in past electoral seasons, choosing to package it in their voter messaging together with other questions that were regarded as more urgent for Italy’s present and future. In the second section, we use diachronic Eurobarometer data from 2018 to 2022 to try to understand how Italians perceive the issue by comparison with other Member States, and how important they regard it to themselves as individuals and to the community. We found significant differences between the two spheres, and whether the issue is seen as important or unimportant does not seem to reflect a consistent pattern of thought. Hence the awareness – at least on the authors’ part – of the effort that citizen-voters and the system of parties and institutions must still make to understand the socio-political phenomenon of immigration, which is as complex in terms of public policy as it is divisive for contemporary societies.