The transalpine country opens the election cycle for next year’s general election with voting in nearly 1,000 municipalities, including those of Palermo and Genoa
Italians will return to the polls this Sunday with municipal elections in nearly a thousand municipalities, including those of four regional capitals: Palermo, Genoa, L’Aquila and Catanzaro. In municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, a second round will take place within two weeks if no candidate gets 50% of the votes. Although only 9 million citizens of the 46 million Italians over 18 are being called upon to express their political affiliations, the vote is seen as a prelude to the general election to be held in the early months of next year.
With them will end the heterogeneous coalition of nine political forces with diverse ideologies, from the extreme left to the sovereignist right, who support the current government of Mario Draghi. At the same time, a nationwide referendum will be held on Sunday on the reform of the judicial system, which will come to nothing, except for a major surprise, as the complexity of the matter is exacerbated by the limited mobilization of the people to try to reach the necessary quorum of the 50% of the electorate.
The municipal elections could be another milestone in the decline of the Five Star Movement (M5E), the cross-cutting and ‘anti-caste’ formation that started the current legislature in 2018 as the most voted and numerous party in parliament, but that, in the four years that have passed since then, it has lost a third of its deputies and senators, and today it is also less than 13% in voting intentions at the national level, according to the latest polls.
Trying to get around the political irrelevance to which it seems doomed, the M5E, led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, is taking part in these municipal elections in most constituencies in alliance with the Democratic Party (PD), the center’s main party. left. Both political forces will carefully analyze the results of this nomination in the polls to see whether it is worth going hand in hand ahead of next year’s general election.
“It will be a test to see if the wide field idea makes things better for us,” said PD leader Enrico Letta, who uses the term to refer to the alliance with the M5E. However, the outlook is not optimistic for the coalition between the two parties, as polls predict a victory for the conservative candidates in the four regional capitals at stake. If the polls confirm the polls prediction, the position of the PD wing asking Letta to only attend the next election will be strengthened to prevent the M5E from dragging them down.
Striking is the collapse of the ‘anticaste’ formation. Despite Conte’s attempts to reactivate it, this political force is only present in 6.5% of the municipalities concerned. His disappearance from public space is particularly striking in Sicily, where there will be only M5E votes in four municipalities of the 120 voting. To assess the magnitude of the fall, it should be remembered that the M5E bordered on 50% of the vote in the 2018 general election.
In addition to the difficulty of combining an anti-system origin with its presence in the last three governments, the M5E’s current weakness is explained by its foreign policy inconsistencies revealed by the war in Ukraine. While Conte opposes sending weapons to the Eastern European country, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, former leader of the M5E, maintains a position much more in line with NATO’s. “A defeat in the vote in the cities on Sunday is destined to weaken Conte’s tactical extremism,” confirms Massimo Franco, a “Corriere della Sera” political analyst, who believes the war has raised “credibility” problems. has exposed. of the ‘anticaste’ formation.
Source: La Verdad
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