Italy is a European country governed by a three-party coalition led by prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Under Ms Meloni, who pledged before taking office to cut immigration, the number of non-EU work visas issued by Italy has in fact increased—illustrating the difficulty rich countries face in restricting migration while dealing with labour shortages.
Italy is the European Union's third-largest member. It has a bigger economy than Russia and more active-duty soldiers than Britain. Yet Italians' lack of confidence has produced what Marco Del Panta, a former diplomat, calls "a tradition of not taking a firm stance in foreign policy, but of trying to please everyone and be friends with everyone." Nathalie Tocci, a political-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, recalls that when she was advising the Italian foreign ministry, officials would wait to see other EU members' positions before giving the minister a range of options; the aim was to find one close to the middle. "We hate taking sides," she says. The roots lie deep in history: the Italian peninsula was for centuries a patchwork of fragile mini-states whose dukes and princes survived by hedging their bets and casually betraying allies. More recently, Italy emerged on the winning side in both world wars by switching teams. The post-war humiliation left an enduring distaste for international protagonism: like Japan and Germany, Italy was content to become an economic heavyweight and a diplomatic featherweight.
Italy is Europe's oldest country, with a median age of 49 (against a continental median of 43). In 2021 alone 2.8% of its university graduates aged between 25 and 34 emigrated. In 2024 Italy registered its lowest birth count since unification in 1861. See global population decline.
Italy's defence spending has historically lagged behind other major NATO economies. In 2024 it devoted an estimated 1.49% of GDP to defence, ahead only of Spain (1.28%) and Canada (1.37%) among major NATO members. The figure was as low as 1.07% of GDP in 2015 and rose under the centre-left governments of Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, peaking at 1.59% in 2020. Under Giuseppe Conte's premiership (2018–21) defence spending increased by more than a quarter.
Italy's public debt exceeds 135% of GDP, making further defence increases fiscally risky. For years Italy lobbied Brussels for military spending to be excluded from the EU's 3%-of-GDP deficit cap under the growth and stability pact.
Italy had western Europe's biggest Communist party during the cold war. Russia was an important trading partner before sanctions were imposed after the invasion of Ukraine. These factors, along with Catholic pacifist traditions and a history of near-incessant invasion, contribute to Italian ambivalence about rearmament. Polls in early 2025 found the public roughly evenly split on raising defence spending to 2% of GDP.
In 2024 Italy's GDP per capita overtook that of Britain for the first time since 2001, at purchasing-power parity, though in nominal terms Italy's GDP per person was still 27% lower. Italy's economy has barely grown over the past decade. In June 2025 the national statistics bureau downgraded its forecast for growth in 2025 from 0.8% to 0.6%. The EU expects growth of no more than 0.7% in 2025, perhaps 0.9% in 2026. Italy received the largest share of the EU's €750bn Recovery and Resilience Facility: €194bn in grants and soft loans, of which €140bn has been disbursed. Pandemic-era home-improvement and facade-renovation subsidies will have transferred an estimated €219bn to the private sector by the time they run their course—over 10% of annual GDP. Milan is in the middle of a construction boom, fuelled partly by a flat-tax scheme for wealthy foreigners devised by the government of Matteo Renzi in 2017. Anyone content to pay an annual flat tax on their non-Italian income was welcome; the tax was initially €100,000, later raised to €200,000, and the 2026 budget proposes raising it to €300,000. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people have taken up the offer, roughly 80% of them settling in Milan. Property prices have soared; inquiries arrive weekly for properties in the €5m-€30m range. In October 2025 prosecutors asked for 36 people to be tried for alleged irregularities in granting building permits for a huge residential complex; investigations into other developments led to the arrest (and subsequent release) of the head of the firm that built the Olympic Village. City officials, wary of future prosecutions, have been reluctant to sign additional building permits, stalling several projects intended to increase housing stock.
The total market value of investible Italian shares is around €660bn, roughly a fifth as much as in Britain. Only five of the world's 500 biggest companies by revenue hail from Italy, according to Fortune, compared with nine from Spain, a smaller economy, and 30 from Germany. Among Europe's 20 most valuable companies, none is listed in Italy. Most Italian companies rely on banks for finance rather than the stockmarket. Only around a quarter of debt transactions in Italy are financed through private credit, compared with an average of 60% across the European Union and as much as 90% in the Netherlands. Reforming the Testo Unico della Finanza (TUF), Italy's financial rulebook, including simplifying public listings, could give a much-needed boost. Ms Meloni has launched a commission to look into changes to the TUF.
Employers' social-security contributions amount to around 40% of the employee's gross salary, compared with only around 30% in Spain.
In the late 1990s Italy ran primary surpluses of 3-6% of GDP to bring down debts before joining the euro. Retirement reforms legislated in 2011 have since been watered down.
Italy has a crowded financial sector. Assicurazioni Generali is the country's biggest insurer and a leading holder of Italian public debt. Mediobanca is its pivotal investment bank. The two biggest banks are Unicredit and Intesa San Paolo. Monte dei Paschi di Siena is the seventh-biggest bank by assets. Since Italy owes more than 130% of its GDP, the government takes a keen interest in who controls the major holders of public debt.
The election of Leo XIV, an American and the first pope from outside Europe since Francis, has jolted the relationship between Italy and the papacy. The Catholic church remains centred in its own mini-state inside the Italian capital. Leo has criticised the MAGA movement that Meloni has courted, creating an uncomfortable juxtaposition: no Italian politician can afford to gainsay a pope, least of all the leader of a party many of whose followers are faithful Catholics.
Ms Meloni's governing coalition comprises her Brothers of Italy party, the centre-right Forza Italia, and the hard-right League led by Matteo Salvini. The coalition is divided on rearmament: Brothers of Italy and Forza Italia back the European Commission's defence-spending plans, while the League opposes them. The League is the coalition party most sympathetic to Russia. Giuseppe Conte, who leads the Five Star Movement and has transformed it into a radical left-wing party since taking over as leader in 2021, also opposes rearmament. The next general election need not be called until December 2027.
The main opposition party is the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), led by Elly Schlein. The PD and the Five Star Movement have co-operated in local elections—in 2025 a joint candidate ousted a conservative mayor in Genoa—but a similar breach to the coalition's divides the PD from the pacifist-inclined Five Stars on defence.
In 2024 Italy began sending migrants rescued at sea, who were felt to have a shaky case for asylum, to camps in Albania for fast-track processing. The scheme designates the camps as Italian territory. Italian judges blocked the scheme on suspicion it violated EU law and ordered migrants returned to Italy. In August 2025 the European Court of Justice upheld those rulings, finding that for a country to be placed on a safe list for repatriation, it must offer "adequate protection to its entire population". Only 37 people have been repatriated under the scheme, and the camps house few inmates. Over the five years to the end of 2028 the scheme is expected to cost around €680m ($790m).
The EU's Pact on Migration and Asylum, due to come into effect in June 2026, will allow member states to designate countries as broadly safe while making exceptions for certain areas or minorities. Denmark, which holds the EU's rotating six-month presidency, wants the bloc to apply these looser provisions before the pact comes into force.
L'Aquila, a city north-east of Rome, was struck by an earthquake in 2009 that killed more than 300 people and made some 80,000 homeless. The city sits on one of Europe's most seismically active regions. Sixteen years later it remains a place of cranes, scaffolding and unfinished reconstruction; nearly 4,000 of L'Aquila's schoolchildren are still being taught in "provisional scholastic-use modules" built to last five years. The government named L'Aquila Italy's capital of culture for 2026. The city is often compared to Salzburg for its mountain setting and passion for classical music; Arthur Rubinstein said it had the most musically intelligent audiences he had encountered anywhere. After the disaster, Renzo Piano designed an all-wood 238-seat auditorium for the city. L'Aquila's massive 16th-century castle, built by southern Italy's Spanish rulers, awaits full restoration.
In 2019 Italy's constitutional court in effect legalised doctor-assisted suicide under certain conditions, following the death of Fabiano Antoniani, a music producer left tetraplegic and blind by a traffic accident. When Marco Cappato, a former MEP and right-to-die activist who accompanied him to Dignitas in Switzerland, was prosecuted for aiding suicide, the court ruled that the basis for charging him had been unconstitutional. It provided an exception for assisting those in unbearable and irreversible suffering, so long as they were fully capable of making decisions.
Despite the ruling, health authorities—particularly in right-controlled regions—have simply ignored assisted-dying requests. A total of 11 people have been helped to commit suicide in Italy since the ruling, and polls suggest Italians generally support reform. In February 2025 Tuscany became the first region to approve a law regulating medically assisted suicide, imposing a 30-day time-limit for health authorities to make a decision. Sardinia followed in September 2025; Umbria is expected next. The Italian bishops' association says such moves are "in radical contrast with the value of the human person." Giorgia Meloni's government has introduced a bill in the Senate that critics say would unduly restrict access, as it would apply only to those on life-support machines and exclude the public health system, making assisted dying available only to those who can afford private care. Marina Berlusconi, the daughter of the late Silvio, who bankrolls Forza Italia, has expressed sympathy for the right-to-die cause. With a free vote and a secret ballot the result is uncertain.
Italy's mafia organisations have turned to social media, particularly TikTok, to recruit new blood, according to a report by the Fondazione Magna Grecia (an NGO promoting the development of Italy's southern Mezzogiorno region) which analysed 6,200 TikTok posts. Criminal networks package their message in the language of aspirational consumption—fast cars, glamorous parties, ostentatious wealth—to normalise their image and overcome moral resistance to violence. The Amato-Pagano clan near Naples used such content to recruit new affiliates, who were then trained in extortion. Some bosses have used TikTok to control their clans from within jail, using emoticons as code: a black flag for mourning, a chain for imprisonment, an hourglass for revenge. In July 2025 TikTok signed an agreement with Italy's anti-Mafia parliamentary commission and has since removed thousands of videos.
In mid-November 2025 the lower house of parliament unanimously passed a bill championed by Laura Boldrini, a former speaker from the centre-left Democratic Party, redefining rape as any sexual act without "free and current" consent—bringing Italy in line with much of the rest of Europe. But the populist-right League then withdrew its support, meaning more hearings and possible revisions in the Senate. On the same day that the consent reform stalled, parliament passed a separate law criminalising femicide—the murder of a woman as an act of hate or control, or because she did not want a sexual relationship—with a maximum punishment of life in prison.
Attention to gender-based violence has been rising since the murder of Giulia Cecchettin, a university student, by her ex-boyfriend in 2023. Ciro Grillo, the son of the founder of the Five Star Movement, was convicted in September 2025 of participating in a gang rape. The government recently added restrictions on sex education in schools, even as it imposed harsh penalties for gendered violence—a tension critics say undermines prevention.
RAI, the state-run broadcaster, is Italy's dominant television network. Ms Meloni's government has established an iron grip over it. The late Silvio Berlusconi's family controls Mediaset, the other dominant presence in terrestrial TV. TV remains the primary source of news for almost half of Italians.
The 2026 Winter Olympics are due to start in Milan on February 6th 2026. Milan, which sits in the Po valley at just 122 metres above sea level, hosts the skating events. Most other Olympic and Paralympic competitions are held at various Alpine towns, with Cortina d'Ampezzo—a five-hour drive from Milan and the winter playground of Italy's bankers, industrialists and entertainers—hosting curling, sliding events (bobsleigh, skeleton and luge) and some skiing. The women's downhill and super-G take place on the Olympia delle Tofane run, whose "Schuss" section has a 64% gradient. Cortina last held Winter Games in 1956.
On December 10th 2025 UNESCO extended its list of humanity's intangible cultural heritage to include the cuisine of Italy, making it the first country to receive such a designation for its food. Francesco Lollobrigida, Italy's agriculture minister and Giorgia Meloni's brother-in-law, is a vocal defender of Italian culinary standards; he demanded an investigation after a shop in the European Parliament was found selling carbonara sauce containing cream and the wrong cut of pork. Since 1992 the EU has enforced rules stipulating that some foods can only come from certain areas (feta from Greece, Parmesan from northern Italy); of the more than 1,500 foods now protected, over 70% come from five southern European countries. The carbonara so vigorously defended by Italians is no ancestral dish: the first known recipe was printed in 1952—in Chicago. Only in the 1990s did the current "canonical" version take root.
On March 23rd 2026 voters rejected Giorgia Meloni's flagship judicial-reform bill in a referendum by 54% to 46%, on a turnout of 59%—just five points shy of the 2022 general-election level. The bill would have completed the split in a career structure that includes both judges and prosecutors, and introduced random selection for members of the bodies governing each profession. Changing the constitution required a referendum because the government rammed the bill through parliament without consulting the opposition. The result was more emphatic than most polls had predicted; Erik Jones, director of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, suggested Italians have "an almost religious devotion to their 1948 constitution." The leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, called the result "a clear political message to Giorgia Meloni and this government." A junior justice minister resigned during the campaign after alleged financial links to organised crime were exposed; the tourism minister Daniela Santanchè was forced to resign after the results despite having little to do with the defeat—she faces trial for false accounting (she denies wrongdoing).
Ms Meloni had hoped to capitalise on a victory by changing the electoral law to give future winning coalitions more weight in parliament. The defeat also raises questions about a proposed constitutional amendment to enhance the authority of the prime minister while curbing that of the president—which would also require a referendum.
Italy has an awkwardly hybrid judiciary. The system is mostly adversarial, but retains remnants of an older inquisitorial model. Prosecutors and judges form a single professional corps, known as the magistratura: they sit the same entrance exam and can sometimes switch between prosecuting and judging, though legislation passed in 2022 has largely separated their career paths and since then only 1% per year have switched. Separating them fully has been a cause of the political right ever since an earlier reform in 1988 failed to do so.
Italy's courts are among the slowest in the EU. In 2023 it took an average of 511 days to get a ruling at first instance—the third-longest wait in the EU, behind only Greece and Hungary. A decision at third instance took more than 1,000 days, the most in any member state. As a proportion of the population, Italy had the fourth-highest number of lawyers in the EU but the seventh-lowest number of judges. Court fees for low-value claims were prohibitive: more than half their average value. Since 2023, Italy has benefited from €2.3bn from the EU's post-pandemic recovery fund to boost staffing levels in the justice system.
Italy has a tradition of abrogative referendums, which require a turnout of more than half the electorate to be valid. In June 2025 five opposition-backed referendums—four on job security and workplace safety, and one proposing to cut the residency requirement for citizenship from ten years to five—all failed for lack of turnout, which barely reached 30%. Italy has 2.5m foreign residents. More than a third of those who voted rejected the citizenship measure, suggesting nativist feeling extends beyond the right. By contrast, 57% of the electorate (more than 27m voters) turned out in 2011 to block water privatisation.
He who laughs last didn't get the joke.