The “NO” victory in the referendum: Now is the time to bring down Meloni with strikes and protests!
On March 22 and 23, with very high turnout, the Italian electorate voted against the Nordio-Meloni reform. The “No” vote won by a wide margin, beating the “Yes” vote by two million votes. This result is clearly the fruit of the massive mobilizations last fall—on September 22 and October 3 and 4—and of a new generation entering politics to oppose imperialist wars, the Meloni government’s complicity in the Zionist genocide in Palestine, imperialist rearmament, and Trump’s wars.
No matter how much Meloni tries to explain that this vote was not political, but limited to the reform (would she have said the same if the “Yes” vote had won?), the opposite is evident: it was a political vote that dealt a severe blow to this reactionary government.
The Communist Alternative Party (PdAC) immediately mobilized for the “No” (1), emphasizing our distinction from the false bourgeois opposition parties, which are incomparable in terms of anti-worker measures and repressive laws: from the Labor Reform, bearing the Partito Democratico’s (PD) stamp, to the Conte government’s security decrees—the fruit of the alliance between the League and the M5S—and including Minniti’s Libyan concentration camps, also from the PD (let’s not forget that!). We also emphasize the need to resume struggle and mobilization, restarting the path charted by the masses last fall: the leaders of the unions bear the terrible responsibility of having interrupted that extraordinary wave of mass struggles, allowing the government to further tighten repressive laws. Now there is no time to lose: it is necessary to organize a mass general strike to overthrow the Meloni government.
Schlein and Conte’s statements aim to position their bourgeois, anti-worker parties for the upcoming 2027 elections, with the goal of returning to Palazzo Chigi as privileged interlocutors of the industrial and financial big bourgeoisie, placing the union leaderships under their control and at the disposal of employers, starting with the CGIL: it is no coincidence that Landini, in his statements (2), took care not to utter the word “strike,” speaking instead of defending the Constitution and celebrating the victory in the referendum.
The PDAC does not defend the bourgeois Constitution, nor its class-based justice system, which, under orders from the Mossad, represses workers in struggle and arrests comrades from the pro-Palestine movement.
The PDAC also used this referendum as a battleground in a generalized class conflict, to defend the democratic spaces of workers that would be curtailed by a further strengthening of the executive branch, defined by Marx as the “business committee of the bourgeoisie.”
It should be noted that the statements from the reformist left of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC) and Potere al Popolo (PAP, Power to the People) do not differ much from those of the PD, the Five Star Movement, and the Allianza Verde e Sinistra (AVS, Green and Left Alliance). While the former limit themselves, at most, to calling for the resignation of certain undersecretaries involved in criminal activities, the PRC and the PAP make an abstract call for Meloni’s “resignation,” only to then postpone the issue until the 2027 elections: elections in which, predictably, they will once again be dragged along—more or less critically—by the bourgeois center-left.
Much more is possible, and it must be so. We need to build power in the streets to overthrow the Meloni government—not to reopen the doors to bourgeois change, but for a systemic alternative.
The PDAC calls on all unions and movement organizations to organize a mass general strike in workplaces and in the streets, as part of a process of continuous mobilization that will lead to the ousting of the reactionary government led by Giorgia Meloni. This will be achieved through a workers’ government and a socialist alternative to the corrupt capitalist system that is dragging humanity into the abyss.
We do not want the bourgeois opposition’s celebrations of appeasement: we will celebrate when power is in the hands of those who produce wealth, so that it can be put at the service of society and not appropriated by a minority of capitalists who are ruining the world in the name of profit.
Notes
1. www.alternativacomunista.com/politica/nazionale/referendum-sulla-giustizia-le-ragioni-del-nostro-no
2. www.cgil.it/referendum/referendum-giustizia-2026/referendum-landini-un-no-che-ha-uniti-il-paese-inizia-una-nuova-primavera-democratica-ao2gwas5
