Futuro Nazionale is redefining what it means to be Italian

Futuro Nazionale, a new far-right party led by Roberto Vannacci, has emerged as a new challenger in Italian politics. Lisa Zanotti writes the party goes further than simply opposing immigration, with a platform that effectively seeks to redefine what it means to be Italian. There is a new challenger on the Italian right. Since being founded in February this year, Futuro Nazionale (National Future), led by former general Roberto Vannacci, has risen sharply in opinion polls, reaching around 7 per cent support and overtaking Forza Italia for the first time in a poll at the end of August. This came just as the party published its electoral programme. While most attention has focused on its demand to halt and reverse migration, the document does something more than this: it seeks to specify who may become Italian, how long admission to the nation should take and when it may be undone. The programme presents descent as the natural and secure route to membership. Other applicants would have to wait twenty years, demonstrate C1-level Italian through written and oral examinations, maintain a clean criminal record and sign a declaration of assimilation to Greek, Roman and Christian civilisation. A violent crime committed by a naturalised citizen would be treated as evidence that assimilation never genuinely occurred: citizenship could be revoked and the person “remigrated”. This goes beyond immigration policy. It is essentially a theory of national membership, divided between an inherited tier that is secure and an acquired tier that remains conditional. What Italians mean by belonging An online survey fielded in March and April 2022 among 1,082 respondents in each of Italy, Spain and Greece allows us to distinguish concern with preserving national identity from a more exclusionary understanding of membership. Because the survey predates both Futuro Nazionale and Vannacci’s emergence as a national political figure, it cannot tell us who supports the party. It can, however, reveal conceptions of national membership that were already present before the party appeared. Preserving Italian identity was far more common than seeing immigration as a cultural threat. Sixty-four per cent agreed that their identity and way of life must be preserved at all costs, compared with only 26 per cent who believed immigration threatened their culture. Nearly 43 per cent endorsed preservation without endorsing threat. Concern with cultural continuity, in other words, cannot simply be treated as a proxy for either exclusion or support for Vannacci. The direct questions about who could be Italian reveal the structure of this distinction. Local socialisation mattered more than either ancestry or formal citizenship: 83 per cent accepted someone raised in Italy by non-Italian parents, compared with 66 per cent for someone raised abroad by Italian parents and 59 per cent for an Italian citizen born abroad to non-Italian parents. Religion imposed almost no boundary – 87 per cent accepted a non-Catholic – whereas language did: only 36 per cent accepted someone who did not speak Italian. This is not a purely hereditary conception of the nation, but neither is formal citizenship sufficient. It is better described as territorial and assimilationist: being raised in Italy and speaking Italian carry more weight than descent or legal status alone. The key question, then, is not whether identity matters, but when concern with identity becomes exclusionary. To examine that shift, we can focus on the 692 respondents who wanted Italian identity and way of life preserved at all costs and compare them according to whether they rejected, were neutral about or accepted the claim that immigration threatens Italian culture. Cultural threat narrows acquired membership Figure 1 reveals a clear asymmetry. Among identity-preservationists, recognition of someone raised in Italy by foreign parents was 24 percentage points lower among those who endorsed cultural threat than among those who rejected it (66 versus 90 per cent). Recognition of an Italian citizen born abroad to foreign parents was 28 points lower (37 versus 65 per cent). By contrast, recognition of someone raised abroad by Italian parents was virtually identical in the two groups (63 versus 62 per cent). Figure 1: What makes someone Italian? Note: Identity preservation is coded as agreement or strong agreement; threat categories retain disagreement, neutrality and agreement separately. Source: author’s calculations from Olivas Osuna et al. (2026). This is not a general hardening of the boundaries of membership. Cultural threat selectively devalues acquired ties – socialisation and legal citizenship – while leaving descent-based membership largely untouched. Concern with preserving national identity is therefore not inherently exclusionary. The relevant divide runs among identity-preservationists themselves: between those for whom cultural continuity remains compatible with acquired membership and those who understand immigration as a threat to it. Futuro Nazionale’s programme mirrors this hierarchy in legal terms. Its twenty-year rule restricts access to citizenship, while revocation makes naturalised membership conditional even after it has been acquired: subsequent misconduct becomes retrospective evidence that assimilation never genuinely occurred. Research on civic stratification and citizenship deprivation shows how formal citizenship can coexist with durable hierarchies between citizens by birth and naturalised citizens. The party’s commitment to remigration pushes this logic further by connecting conditional membership to potential removal. Comparisons with Vox Comparing Italian attitudes with those in Spain offers some important insights. Spain also has a prominent far-right party in the shape of Vox and the country displays a similar, though generally more inclusive, pattern to belonging. Among Spanish identity-preservationists, recognition of a Spanish citizen born abroad to foreign parents declines from 81 per cent among those rejecting cultural threat, to 73 per cent among neutral respondents and 53 per cent among those accepting it. Recognition through Spanish descent changes far less: 79, 78 and 73 per cent. Vox should therefore not be presented as a party that stops at asking immigrants to adapt. Its 2023 programme proposed ending fast tracks to nationality, requiring verifiable integration and perfect Spanish, expanding the grounds for losing nationality and reconsidering nationality based on birth. At the same time, Vox constructs selective cultural routes into the nation. Its appeal to the “Iberosphere” privileges Latin Americans through shared language, history and civilisation – a strategy that recent work describes as the strategic inclusion of Latin American immigrants. The contrast is therefore not between an Italian party concerned with membership and a Spanish party concerned only with immigration. Both seek to differentiate routes into the nation. Vox’s hierarchy is more selectively civilisational and linguistic, while Futuro Nazionale codifies the distinction with unusual starkness by making descent secure and acquired status probationary. This explicitness echoes recent research showing that national contexts shape whether stigmatised political attitudes are expressed openly or through coded language. A political project, not a ready-made electorate These findings must be read descriptively. The online survey was fielded four years before Futuro Nazionale was founded, contains no direct measure of support for its twenty-year rule or revocation proposal and should not be used to claim that the party’s rise was caused by the identity-immigration gap. Nor does failing to endorse cultural threat make respondents centrist or electorally available. What we see though is that before Futuro Nazionale existed, concern with preserving Italian identity extended well beyond those who saw immigration as a cultural threat. Among those who did perceive threat, the distinction between inherited and acquired membership was already much sharper. Vannacci’s innovation is not the discovery of an ethnonationalist majority. It is the attempt to transform a broad demand for cultural continuity into a hierarchy of citizenship. If far-right politics is shifting from who should be allowed to enter towards which citizens may belong fully and permanently, research must also shift its focus. Recent comparative work already distinguishes between what the nation should preserve, who belongs and who should be excluded. The Italian case suggests why that distinction matters: the next boundary conflict may concern not only admission at the border but the permanence of membership after admission has formally occurred. Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics. Image credit: Alessia Pierdomenico / Shutterstock.com.