Meloni's youth approval drops to 25% as 2027 election looms

Giorgia Meloni's coalition won the 2022 election with a promise to put Italian interests first, but the demographic that will decide whether she gets a second term is the one she has least convinced. Polling published this week shows the government's approval rating among voters under 35 has fallen to 25%, a figure that should concentrate minds in Palazzo Chigi. The next general election is due by spring 2027, and analysts across the political spectrum agree that the youth vote, long volatile, often abstentionist, could be the swing factor in a closely divided electorate.

The numbers behind the headline

The 25% figure is not an outlier. It reflects a consistent trend across multiple survey houses since late 2024. Istituto Cattaneo's tracking poll had Meloni's net approval among 18-34 year olds at minus 32 points in June, while SWG recorded a similar deficit. For context, her overall approval across all age groups hovers around 40-45%, still respectable for a mid-term incumbent. The generational gap is the story. In the 2022 election, Brothers of Italy won roughly 26% of the vote overall but only about 17% among under-35s, behind both the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement. The current polling suggests that gap has widened, not narrowed.

Turnout matters as much as preference. In 2022, only 58% of eligible 18-34 year olds voted, compared with 73% of over-65s. If that pattern repeats, the arithmetic is brutal for Meloni: her core electorate is ageing, while the cohort that dislikes her most is the one least likely to show up. But analysts warn against assuming abstention will save her. The 2024 European elections saw a modest uptick in youth turnout, driven partly by climate and civil-rights issues. A similar mobilisation in 2027, channelled through either the left or the new hard right, could reshape the result.

Economic stagnation and the youth vote

Italy's youth unemployment rate stood at 20.1% in the first quarter of 2026, according to Eurostat, more than double the euro-area average. The figure has barely moved in two years despite Meloni's rhetoric about meritocracy and opportunity. The government's flagship labour reform, the "Jobs Act" revision passed in late 2023, tightened rules on fixed-term contracts but did little to create the permanent, well-paid positions graduates expect. Meanwhile, real wages for under-30s have fallen 4% since 2021 once inflation is accounted for, ISTAT data shows.

The brain drain continues. In 2023, more than 82,000 Italians aged 18-34 registered their residence abroad, the highest annual total since records began in 2012. Germany, Switzerland and the UK remain the top destinations. Meloni's government has introduced a "return bonus" tax break for expatriates who come back, but take-up has been minimal, fewer than 3,000 applications in its first year. Young voters see the measure as a gesture, not a solution. "They treat us as a tax base to be lured back, not as citizens to be invested in," said a 27-year-old researcher in Milan who requested anonymity. That sentiment recurs in focus groups across the north.

Law-and-order agenda alienates younger voters

Since taking office in October 2022, Meloni has signed a string of security decrees: the anti-rave law (Decree-Law 162/2022), the "Caivano decree" targeting youth crime in deprived neighbourhoods, and tighter rules on public protests. The government argues these measures restore order after years of permissiveness. Critics say they criminalise youth culture and dissent. The anti-rave law, which allows prefects to ban gatherings deemed a risk to public order, has been used against student occupations and climate camps as well as illegal parties. The Caivano decree lowered the age of criminal responsibility for certain offences and expanded detention powers for minors.

These moves play well with Meloni's base, voters over 50 who prioritise security, but they land differently on university campuses and in the peripheral housing estates where youth unemployment exceeds 40%. A survey by the Luigi Einaudi Foundation in March 2026 found 68% of under-35s believed the government "cares more about repression than opportunity." The same poll showed only 12% trusted the executive to improve their job prospects. The disconnect is not merely ideological; it is generational. The prime minister is 48, her ministers average 56, and the parliamentary group is the oldest in the G7.

The Vannacci factor: competition on the right

The most striking development of the past year is not the left's consolidation of the youth vote, that was expected, but the emergence of a hard-right alternative that also appeals to young men. Roberto Vannacci, a former army general expelled from the military after publishing a self-published book attacking feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration, won a European Parliament seat for Lega in June 2024 with over 500,000 preference votes. Since then, his "Mondo al Contrario" (World Upside Down) movement has organised rallies in Milan, Rome and Bologna that draw thousands, predominantly men under 30.

Vannacci's pitch is distinct from Meloni's. Where she offers institutional conservatism, defence of the traditional family, sovereignty within the EU, fiscal discipline, he offers cultural warfare: opposition to gender ideology, rejection of "woke" corporate policies, a hyperbolic defence of Western civilisation. His rhetoric is more aggressive, his social-media operation more sophisticated. Polling by Tecnè in July 2026 put Vannacci's personal approval among 18-29 year old men at 34%, compared with Meloni's 22% in the same demographic. For Brothers of Italy, this is a nightmare scenario: a competitor on the right who speaks the language of TikTok while the prime minister speaks the language of Brussels summits.

Left's opportunity and its limits

The Democratic Party (PD) and the Greens-Left Alliance (AVS) together command roughly 45% of under-35 support in current polls. Elly Schlein, the PD secretary since 2023, has made youth policy central: a statutory minimum wage of €9 per hour, universal childcare, a "green jobs" guarantee for graduates. AVS pushes further: free university tuition, a wealth tax to fund housing. On paper, this should consolidate the youth vote. In practice, fragmentation looms. The Five Star Movement, still polling 12-14% nationally, retains a distinct youth following in the south, particularly on environmental and anti-establishment grounds. Carlo Calenda's Action party and Matteo Renzi's Italia Viva compete for the graduate, pro-EU centrist slice.

The opposition's structural problem is the electoral law. The current Rosatellum system, a mixed member-majoritarian formula, rewards coalitions that run joint candidates in single-member seats. The centre-left has failed to agree on a common platform for 2027, let alone a seat-sharing deal. Schlein and Giuseppe Conte (M5S) barely speak. Without a unified ticket, the left's youth advantage dissipates in the first-past-the-post component, which decides roughly 37% of seats. Meloni's strategists know this. Their path to a majority does not require winning young voters; it requires the opposition to split them.

Structural problems no government has solved

Italy's youth crisis predates Meloni by decades. The "garanzia giovani" (youth guarantee) scheme launched in 2014 under the Letta government, refined by Renzi, extended by Gentiloni and Conte, has placed 1.3 million young people in training or work since inception, but only 38% of participants found stable employment within six months, according to a 2025 Court of Auditors report. The citizenship income (reddito di cittadinanza), introduced by the first Conte government in 2019, reduced absolute poverty but created disincentives for low-wage work; Meloni replaced it with a narrower "inclusion allowance" in 2024, cutting recipient numbers by 40%.

Housing is the silent driver of disaffection. In Milan, average rent for a one-bedroom flat now exceeds €1,200 per month, more than the median net salary of a 25-year-old graduate. Rome, Bologna and Florence show similar ratios. The government's 2025 budget allocated €1.2 billion for student housing and first-home guarantees, but construction lead times mean few units will exist before 2028. Young voters notice the lag. They also notice that pension expenditure, €320 billion in 2025, 16% of GDP, dwarfs every youth-oriented line item combined. The demographic arithmetic is unforgiving: Italy's median age is 48, the oldest in the EU. Every election cycle, the grey vote grows heavier.

The European dimension

Meloni's standing in Brussels has been an asset at home: she negotiated a favourable revision of the Stability and Growth Pact, secured €194 billion in Recovery Fund disbursements, and positioned Italy as a mediator on migration. But European credibility does not translate into domestic youth support. The same voters who appreciate her defence of Italian interests in the Council see the EU as a distant technocracy. The 2024 European elections showed this disconnect: Brothers of Italy won 28.8% nationally but only 19% among under-35s, while the pro-EU United States of Europe list (Bonino-Renzi) took 11% of the youth vote despite scoring 3.8% overall. Meloni's European capital is spent in rooms young Italians do not inhabit.

There is also the Vannacci-Europe paradox. The general is an MEP, elected on a Lega list that sits in the Patriots for Europe group alongside Viktor Orbán's Fidesz and Marine Le Pen's National Rally. His movement is explicitly anti-EU in rhetoric, yet his mandate is European. This contradiction does not trouble his supporters; they see the Parliament as a platform, not a project. For Meloni, who has worked to mainstream her party in the European Conservatives and Reformists group, Vannacci represents a flank she cannot easily occupy without alienating the centrist voters she needs in the north.

What the polls cannot capture

Quantitative data misses the qualitative shift. In 2022, the dominant youth mood was resignation, "nothing changes, why vote?" Today, focus groups conducted by Demos & Pi in May 2026 describe a polarised energy: "anger" on the left, "revenge" on the right. The language has changed. Climate, housing, precarious work, gender rights, these are not abstract issues but daily realities. The "No Meloni Day" rally in Rome last November, organised by student unions and climate groups, drew an estimated 15,000 people, mostly under 30. Vannacci's counter-rally in Milan two weeks later drew 12,000, almost entirely young men. Neither event was covered extensively by mainstream television, but both flooded TikTok and Instagram for days.

This digital mobilisation is harder to poll than traditional party allegiance. It is also more volatile. The Five Star Movement's 2013 surge was built on a similar online-offline loop; it collapsed when the movement entered government. Vannacci's movement has not yet faced the test of power. Meloni has. Her government's record, on wages, housing, civil rights, migration, is the terrain on which 2027 will be fought. The 25% approval rating is not a ceiling; it is a starting line.