Italy Slams the Door on Millions: What the 2025 Citizenship Law Really Means
For generations, the promise of Italian citizenship by descent — jus sanguinis, or "right of blood" — was one of the most compelling offers in the global citizenship landscape. If you had an Italian great-great-grandparent who emigrated to Argentina in 1890, you could, in theory, claim a European Union passport. That era is now definitively over, and the legal architecture being built around its closure is more permanent than many hopefuls had dared believe.
Italy's Constitutional Court not only upheld the country's sweeping 2025 citizenship restrictions in March but published its full legal reasoning in late April 2026 — a document that immigration lawyers describe as a systematic dismantling of the arguments that had fueled citizenship claims for decades. According to SBS, the court's written reasoning made clear it "will not accept constitutional challenges involving citizenship claims beyond the third generation" — language that effectively draws a hard line in constitutional sand.
Yet the fight isn't entirely over. A separate, high-stakes case before Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation — involving two American families and one Venezuelan family — is expected to rule in the coming months on a narrower but potentially explosive question: whether citizenship, once acquired at birth, is a permanent right that cannot be retroactively stripped. The answer could either consolidate the new restrictions or crack them open.
The Old Rules: How Jus Sanguinis Created 60–80 Million Potential Italians
To understand why the 2025 law was so significant, you need to grasp just how expansive the previous rules were. Italian citizenship law, rooted in the Civil Code of 1865 and refined over the following century, operated on a principle of near-unlimited blood inheritance. If any Italian ancestor was alive after March 17, 1861 — the date of Italian unification — and their citizenship passed unbroken through the generations (without a male ancestor naturalizing abroad before a child's birth, for example), then a living descendant could claim Italian nationality.
The Italian foreign ministry itself estimated that between 60 and 80 million people worldwide were potentially eligible under this framework. Nearly 17 million Americans claim Italian ancestry according to U.S. Census data, and the diaspora populations in Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Venezuela were similarly enormous. Italy's consulates became overwhelmed, with wait times for citizenship appointments stretching years in some cities.
Between 2014 and 2024, the number of Italians living abroad rose 40%, from 4.6 million to 6.4 million. That growth partly reflects legitimate emigration, but it also reflects a booming citizenship-by-descent industry — lawyers, genealogists, and fixers who turned ancestral claims into EU passports. Italian consulates in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York became notorious bottlenecks, with some applicants waiting a decade for appointments.
The Tajani Decree: What Changed in May 2025
In March 2025, Italian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani proposed what would become the most significant reform to Italian citizenship law in decades. The legislation — formally known as the "Tajani decree" — imposed a hard cutoff: citizenship by descent would now be available only to those with an Italian parent or grandparent. Great-grandparents and beyond no longer counted.
The law passed in May 2025 and immediately faced legal challenges. Critics argued it violated constitutionally protected rights of Italian citizens abroad, retroactively stripped rights that had already vested, and discriminated against diaspora communities that had developed legitimate expectations under the old rules.
Tajani's stated rationale was twofold. First, the sheer administrative burden: Italy's consular system was drowning under the volume of applications. Second, and more explosive politically, was a 2024 scandal in which the Italian consulate in Venezuela was alleged to have illegally granted citizenship to five individuals with alleged ties to Hezbollah. The Venezuela case gave reform advocates a visceral example of how the open-ended system could be exploited, and it gave political cover to a government that was already uncomfortable with the scale of the diaspora citizenship pipeline.
The Hezbollah allegation was, politically speaking, a gift to reformers — it transformed an abstract debate about bureaucratic capacity into a security and sovereignty argument that was much harder to counter.
The Constitutional Court Ruling: March 12, 2026
On March 12, 2026, Italy's Constitutional Court issued its verdict: the 2025 law was upheld. The court rejected challenges as either "unfounded" or "inadmissible" — a two-pronged dismissal that closed off both the substantive constitutional arguments and the procedural pathways through which they were brought.
But the real weight came six weeks later, when the court published its full written reasoning. Legal documents of this kind are rarely page-turners, but this one carried immediate practical consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Lawyers reviewing the opinion noted that the court's language was deliberately broad — not merely upholding the specific law, but articulating a constitutional framework under which claims beyond the third generation would be systematically rejected going forward.
The ruling addressed several key arguments that citizenship advocates had pinned their hopes on:
- Retroactivity: Challengers argued the law retroactively stripped rights already acquired at birth. The court held that citizenship by descent was not a fully vested right in the constitutional sense until formally recognized, meaning the legislature had room to set conditions.
- Equal treatment: The court found the grandparent cutoff to be a rational legislative choice, not an arbitrary discrimination, given the state's legitimate interest in managing the scope of its citizenship rolls.
- International obligations: Arguments rooted in Italy's obligations to its diaspora under international law were dismissed as insufficiently grounded in the constitutional text.
The Last Legal Hope: The Supreme Court of Cassation Test Case
While the Constitutional Court ruled on the law's validity, a separate track of litigation continues in the Supreme Court of Cassation — Italy's highest court for civil and criminal matters. As The Guardian reported in April 2026, a test case involving two American families and one Venezuelan family is expected to rule soon on a different question: the "minor rule."
The minor rule refers to a legal principle governing what happens when an Italian citizen naturalizes as a foreign national. Before 1992, Italy generally did not allow dual citizenship, meaning Italian emigrants who became American, Australian, or Argentine citizens typically lost their Italian nationality in the process. Whether their Italian citizenship passed to children born before or after that naturalization — and at what age the child was at the time — determines whether the citizenship chain remained intact.
The Cassation case argues that citizenship, once transmitted at birth, constitutes a permanent constitutional right that the 2025 law cannot extinguish retroactively. If the Cassation court accepts this reasoning, it could create a constitutional conflict with the Constitutional Court's ruling — or, more likely, carve out a narrow class of applicants whose pre-existing claims survive the new restrictions.
Legal observers are cautious about expectations. The Constitutional Court ruling was comprehensive enough that the Cassation court would need to find a very specific, narrow hook to rule differently without directly contradicting it. But narrow hooks have opened doors before in Italian constitutional jurisprudence.
The Human Impact: Australians, Americans, and the Diaspora Reckoning
The abstract legal architecture translates into concrete disruption for real people. In Australia, where Italian immigration was substantial through the 1950s and 1960s, many applicants had been in the middle of multi-year application processes when the 2025 law passed. SBS described the reaction as "hard to swallow" — not just for aspirants, but for families who had invested significant money in genealogical research, legal fees, and translation services, often spanning years.
In the United States, the situation carries a particular edge. With nearly 17 million Americans claiming Italian ancestry, the potential applicant pool was enormous — and the legal industry that had grown up around it was substantial. Law firms specializing in Italian citizenship by descent had become a recognizable niche, advertising on social media and promising a pathway to EU residency rights, freedom of movement across 27 countries, and the intangible pull of ancestral connection.
The Venezuelan dimension adds a different layer of complexity. Venezuela's large Italian-descended community had been a significant source of citizenship applications, and the country's political and economic collapse gave those applications particular urgency — Italian citizenship was, for many, a genuine escape route. The irony that the Venezuelan consulate scandal partly triggered the restriction is not lost on Venezuelan-Italian families now trapped on the wrong side of the new law.
Analysis: What This Ruling Actually Signals
The 2025 Tajani decree and its constitutional validation are not aberrations. They fit within a broader European trend toward tightening the conditions under which diaspora populations can access citizenship — a trend driven by a mix of administrative realism, security concerns, and a more guarded conception of national belonging.
Italy's situation was, admittedly, extreme. No other major European country had allowed citizenship chains to extend indefinitely back to 1861 with so few limiting conditions. The scale — 60 to 80 million potential claimants for a country of 60 million residents — was not sustainable as a practical matter, regardless of how one feels about the principle.
But the manner of the change matters. Cutting off claims retroactively, for people who were mid-process or who had made significant life decisions based on reasonable expectations of eligibility, is meaningfully different from changing the rules prospectively. The Constitutional Court's reasoning that citizenship by descent was not "fully vested" until formally recognized is legally defensible, but it will feel like sophistry to someone who spent three years gathering documents and paid €10,000 in legal fees.
The political economy here is also worth noting. The grandparent rule is not merely administratively convenient — it tracks closely with living memory and direct familial connection. A grandchild of an Italian immigrant is likely to have actual cultural or familial ties to Italy. A great-great-grandchild researching an 1880 emigrant record probably does not. Drawing the line at the second generation is not unreasonable as a policy matter, even if the transition was harsh.
The pending Cassation ruling will tell us whether the Italian judicial system is willing to carve out any protection for people whose claims were already in motion — or whether the Constitutional Court's comprehensive framing has closed that door as well.
FAQ: Italian Citizenship by Descent After the 2025 Law
Can I still apply for Italian citizenship if my grandparent was Italian?
Yes. The 2025 law explicitly preserved citizenship by descent through parents and grandparents. If your mother, father, maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, or any direct grandparent was an Italian citizen, you remain eligible under the new rules, subject to normal conditions including the citizenship chain not being broken by naturalization before a parent's birth.
What if my great-grandparent was Italian? Am I completely shut out?
Under the current law as upheld by the Constitutional Court, claims extending only to great-grandparents or further back are no longer recognized. The only remaining legal avenue is the Supreme Court of Cassation test case, which could potentially carve out exceptions for specific factual circumstances — but legal observers do not consider a favorable ruling likely given the Constitutional Court's comprehensive reasoning.
What is the "minor rule" and why does it matter?
The minor rule concerns what happens when an Italian citizen naturalizes as a foreign national while their child is still a minor. Before 1992, Italy required emigrants who naturalized abroad to renounce Italian citizenship. Whether Italian citizenship passed to a child born before that naturalization, and whether the child was still a minor at the time, affects whether the citizenship chain survived. The pending Cassation case tests whether these pre-existing transmitted citizenship rights can be extinguished by the 2025 law.
Are applications already in process grandfathered under the old rules?
No automatic grandfathering was built into the 2025 law, and the Constitutional Court did not require one. Applications that were submitted but not adjudicated before the law's enactment are generally being evaluated under the new rules. Some applicants have sought injunctions in Italian courts, with mixed results.
Does this affect citizenship claims through Italian mothers?
Italy only recognized matrilineal citizenship transmission from 1948 onward (when the Constitution came into force). Claims through maternal lines before 1948 were already subject to complex litigation in Italian courts. The 2025 law's grandparent cutoff applies regardless of whether the line runs through the paternal or maternal side — but the pre-1948 maternal line question is a separate issue that predates the 2025 reform and is not directly addressed by it.
Conclusion: A Door Closed, A Crack Remaining
Italy's 2025 citizenship reform and its constitutional validation in 2026 mark the end of one of the most expansive citizenship-by-descent regimes in the democratic world. The Constitutional Court's full written reasoning signals that the court views this as a settled matter — not a close call awaiting further legal development, but an affirmative reorientation of how Italy conceives of its relationship to its global diaspora.
For the millions who had hoped, planned, or already invested in an Italian citizenship claim beyond the grandparent level, the path is now formally closed through the constitutional route. The Supreme Court of Cassation case offers a narrow, technical avenue that might benefit a specific subset of claimants — those whose claims rest on the "minor rule" and who can argue that citizenship was transmitted at birth rather than merely claimed later. But that window, if it opens at all, will be small.
What endures from this episode is a lesson about the fragility of legal expectations built on open-ended inheritance rules. Italy's jus sanguinis system was genuinely unusual in its breadth, and the 40% growth in the overseas Italian population in a single decade suggests it had become something quite different from its original purpose — not a recognition of genuine Italian heritage, but a vehicle for EU passport acquisition. Closing that vehicle was, on balance, defensible policy. The cost was paid by real people who played by rules that were changed on them mid-game — and that cost deserves acknowledgment even by those who accept the policy logic.
For those watching closely, the Cassation ruling — expected in the coming months — will be the last significant legal development in this chapter. After that, Italian citizenship by descent will be, for most of the world's Italian diaspora, a matter of family history rather than legal possibility.
