The polls point to the victory of Giorgia Meloni’s neo-fascist party, an ally of Vox. A woman can rule Italy for the first time
This Sunday, 51 and a half million Italians will be called to the polls to take part in the parliamentary elections following a mid-summer election campaign. It is an anomaly in the country explained by the hasty end last July of the government led by Mario Draghi when the heterogeneous coalition that supported it was blown up. Below we offer you the eight keys to this election, which could leave the right-wing Giorgia Meloni as the first woman to head an Executive in Italy.
All polls predict a clear victory for the conservative bloc, led by Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy), the far-right party led by Giorgia Meloni, which would gain about 25% of the vote. It is a huge step compared to the 4% it achieved in the last general election, held in 2018. The other political forces in this coalition are Matteo Salvini’s League and Forza Italia, led by Silvio Berlusconi. They would get 12% and 8% of the vote, respectively, according to the polls. Along with other minor parties, the Conservatives were able to win about half of the vote and, thanks to the effects of the electoral law, control two-thirds of parliament. If confirmed, the next government would be right-wing and commanded by FdI, a political force affiliated with Vox.
While FdI’s victory is taken for granted, it is not so clear that Meloni will be the head of government. Whether a woman in Italy can hold the reins for the first time depends primarily on the balance that the right-wing coalition parties achieve. The president of the republic, Sergio Mattarella, to whom the constitution assigns responsibility for appointing the prime minister and the other members of his cabinet, will also have a voice in the chapter. Mattarella wants guarantees that the next Executive will not threaten Italy’s international placement as a member of, among others, the European Union and NATO. The head of state has already shown signs of his veto power in the past by excluding a possible economics minister because he is against the euro. Meloni is highly critical of Brussels and an ally of the Eurosceptic leaders of Hungary and Poland.
FdI embodied the sole opposition to the previous government, led by Mario Draghi. For the past year and a half, Meloni has thus managed to monopolize the media space and win the sympathy of anyone dissatisfied with the Executive’s performance. Its political strength today represents the protest vote and has led to a wide transfer of voters who previously opted for the League or the Five Star Movement; they join their historic core of far-right sympathizers. The FdI candidate has forged an image of herself as a tough and direct woman, able to implement the reforms the country needs to give back to Italians the pride of belonging to a nation that has been in decline for decades. is.
The previous legislature, of course, should have ended in the first quarter of 2023, but the end was hastened when last July, the League, Forza Italia and the populist five-star movement left the coalition backing the government of Mario Draghi, who has been in power since February 2021. This executive was backed by a very broad alliance of political forces who understood that the country was in an emergency due to the pandemic. They believed that Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, was the most suitable figure to take Italy out of the health crisis and properly invest the millionaire funds of the European Recovery Plan.
The leader, Meloni, affirms that in his political power there is “no fascist, racist or anti-Semitic nostalgia” and condemns the “infamous” laws against the Jews of the period when Benito Mussolini was in power. While trying to present the FdI as a modern and democratically conservative formation, it takes a stance on issues such as immigration that borders on xenophobia. Moreover, his party’s origins lie in the MSI, a movement founded after the Second World War by people nostalgic for the “Duce”, and the controversial symbol of this formation, the so-called “Tricolor Flame”, is still present on the coat of arms of FdI. Unsurprisingly, there are regular episodes where local leaders of this political power are discovered making the fascist salute.
Barring a last-minute surprise, the Democratic Party (PD), the main center-left force in the country, will be relegated to the opposition. The polls predict it will get about 22% of the vote, a discreet result partly explained by the few passions aroused by its leader, Enrico Letta. He failed to forge alliances with other parties, nor does his strategy of polarizing the campaign by presenting himself as Meloni’s antithesis seem to be working. The PD’s foreseeable defeat could lead to an internal reckoning from which a new leadership of the Italian left will emerge.
While it initially valued presenting at the election in alliance with the PD, in the end the Five Star Movement (M5E) agrees on its own. Led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, this populist political force was the protagonist of the previous legislature: it was the largest in parliament and participated in all three governments. The election campaign hasn’t gone too badly for Conte with the demand for citizenship income, his star mate in the previous legislature, and was able to take more than 13% of the vote despite being considered dead a few months ago due to wear and tear and power rifts, political contradictions and internal struggles. The so-called Third Pole, formed by two small centrist parties, is also expected to gain parliamentary representation with about 7% of the vote.
-It is one of the great unknowns of this election. It is estimated that more than 40% of voters still do not know who they will vote for or even if they will vote. According to experts, many of them will be decided in the final hours before they go to the polls, so any promise or shocking news in the latter part of the campaign could have a substantial impact on the results. Demobilization is greater among left-wing voters because of the poor prospects for their own country and the fact that victory is discounted for the conservative bloc.
Source: La Verdad
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