A proposed overhaul to massively liberalize the rights of Italy’s hunters has become the new front in the country’s culture wars.
ROME — Political competition is heating up on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right flank ahead of next year’s election — and her government’s proposed reform of hunting laws has become the latest battleground in Italy’s culture wars.
The legislation, which would mark Italy’s biggest overhaul of hunting laws in more than three decades, would expand the rights of hunters by extending hunting grounds and seasons and increasing the number of huntable species. Most controversially, it would redefine hunters as “bioregulators” who help protect biodiversity. It has been passed by the country’s senate and is now being examined by the Agriculture Committee of Italy’s parliament.
If passed, the bill would also renew tensions between Rome and Brussels. The European Commission in December sent Rome an official letter regarding the proposal over concerns it could violate the EU’s Birds Directive; the EU executive has said it is “closely monitoring” the passage of legislation.
Hunters account for less than 1 percent of Italy’s population, and polls suggest around eight in 10 Italians regard hunting as dangerous or unethical. The government’s determination to push ahead with the reform regardless has drawn attention as a potential play to woo conservative voters — particularly with Meloni now facing pressure from a new nationalist movement belonging to retired General Roberto Vannacci.
“We considered it essential to revise legislation that is more than 30 years old and adapt it to an environmental and hunting context that has changed considerably,” Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Luca De Carlo told POLITICO, rejecting suggestions the reform was politically driven.
The bill is “not aimed at the conservative electorate” but at protecting wildlife through better management, argued the lawmaker from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.
Environmental groups disagree. Animal and environmental rights activists have been protesting the reform — which has been dubbed the sparatutto (“shoot everything”) act by the opposition — in Naples this week. Meanwhile, Green Europe leader Angelo Bonelli accused Meloni of trying to “chase a few votes from the hunting community.”
Though the reform has been under discussion for months, its passage comes as Meloni is starting to see a significant challenge to her right. In this more competitive field, hunting has become part of a broader constellation of issues — along with firearms, migration and rural identity — that increasingly serve as markers for a wider conservative electorate that the PM can no longer take for granted.
Vannacci has already appeared at public meetings with hunting associations to argue that hunting is not merely a pastime but flows from a duty to manage and discipline nature. A former paratrooper and army general, he has been a natural draw for hunters and gun owners.
Meanwhile, the reform has also exposed tensions within Meloni’s coalition, with some parliamentarians from both Forza Italia and Noi Moderati expressing reservations.
According to Daniele Albertazzi, a politics professor at the University of Surrey and the author of several books on the radical right, such clashes will likely multiply as coalition partners try to distinguish themselves from the nationalist right, and as the Brothers of Italy looks to retain voters tempted by Vannacci’s movement.
Giovanni Orsina, a politics professor at Luiss University, views the legislation as less a debate over hunting than yet another battle over identity.
“The space for ideological politics has become increasingly narrow,” Orsina said. “Politics increasingly plays out on the margins. This is one of those margins.”