The political leader of the Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.
Marco Cantile | Light flare | Getty Images
Italians are set to elect the country’s first female prime minister and the first far-right-led government since the end of World War II.
Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party is expected to win 26.4% of the vote, according to an exit poll late Sunday evening. The party is part of a broad right-wing coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and a more minor coalition partner, Noi Moderati.
This alliance is expected to garner 44% of the vote, according to exit polls, enough to secure a parliamentary majority with the centre-left bloc at 27.4%. The first projections of the actual election results are expected on Monday morning.
Italy’s main centre-left party conceded defeat early Monday morning, Reuters reported.
Reaching a political consensus and cementing a coalition could take weeks and a new government may not come to power until October. But the vote could mark a big political shift for a pivotal European country struggling with ongoing economic and political instability.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party was established in 2012, but has its roots in the 20th-century Italian neo-fascist movement that emerged after the death of fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1945. A speech by Meloni in 2019 helped her to become a household name when an unsuspecting DJ remixed her lyrics (“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian”) into a piece of dance music, which is gone viral.
After winning 4% of the vote in the 2018 election, Italy’s Brothers and Meloni, 45, used their opposition to break into the mainstream. Meloni has taken great steps to appeal to a more moderate centre-right majority in Italian society and claims to have rid his party of fascist elements.
Incumbent Mario Draghi, a highly regarded technocrat who was ousted by infighting in July, is still in power in a gatekeeper role. Sunday’s snap elections in the EU’s third-largest economy come six months before they are due to be held.
The election is being watched closely in Brussels as the European region grapples with war in Ukraine, an energy crisis and runaway inflation. Brothers of Italy reversed its opposition to the eurobut defends the reform of the EU in order to make it less bureaucratic and less influential on internal politics.
On the economic side, he referred to the centre-right coalition’s position that the next government should reduce sales taxes on certain goods to ease the cost of living crisis, and said the Italy is expected to renegotiate its Covid-19 recovery funds with the EU. The party has been pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine and supports sanctions against Russia.
Centre-left politicians fear that relations with the rest of Europe will change under a government led by Meloni. Enrico Letta, the leader of the Democratic Party, told CNBC earlier this month that Italy has two options when it comes to Europe: stay at the top of economies and governance, or be “relegated”.
″[The] The first option is to keep our position in the “first division”. The first division is Brussels and Germany, France, Spain, the big European countries, the founders, like us. [The] second option is to be relegated to the second division with Poland and Hungary, deciding to stay with them against Brussels, against Berlin, against Paris and Madrid,” he said at the Ambrosetti economic forum in early September.
“I think it would be a disaster for Italy to choose the second division,” he said.
—CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt contributed to this article.