A right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is on track for a decisive victory in Italy’s snap election, after beating a string of rivals who failed to forge a unified front to compete more effectively against the bloc, exit polls showed.
Meloni’s coalition – along with Matteo Salvini’s Nationalist League and media mogul and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – is said to have won between 42 and 49% of the total vote, enough to secure a comfortable parliamentary majority.
However, the right-wing coalition appears to be short of the two-thirds of the seats it would need for the press to push forward its plans to amend Italy’s constitution, polls have shown.
Under Italy’s complicated electoral system, one-third of parliamentary seats are awarded by first-past-the-post, which has given a significant advantage to center-right parties that have united behind a single candidate in each of these areas, while their adversaries disputed among themselves.
Meloni’s brothers from Italy, heir to the neo-fascist movement, will be the largest party in the new parliament, with around a quarter of the vote. It looks like he took a higher percentage than the League and Forza Italia combined, exit polls showed.
The results mark a triumph for Meloni, given that the Brothers of Italy won just 4% of the vote in the last general election in 2018, although analysts have warned that his support could prove fleeting given the serious challenges it will face.
“If you look at the last 30 years, there’s been a succession of people selling themselves as new, getting attention for a while, generally struggling to deliver, and then people getting angry. electorate is quickly moving on to someone else,” said Daniele Albertazzi, a politics professor at the University of Surrey.
Italy’s electoral process has been closely watched in Brussels and Washington, where policymakers are concerned about what the new government will mean for Rome’s relations with the EU and Italy’s approach to the war in Ukraine.
Outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi took a strong stance against the Russian invasion and helped craft tough EU sanctions against Moscow. Meloni also strongly criticized the invasion and pledged to maintain a strong stance against Russia.
But the opinions of its partners are more ambiguous. Salvini, a longtime Putin admirer, has complained about the toll the sanctions have taken on Italian families and businesses, while Berlusconi, 86 on Thursday, seemed to justify the invasionclaiming that Putin had simply wanted to replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv with “decent people”.
Global markets will also be eagerly watching the shape of the new government, particularly the composition of the cabinet – and who gets the critical post of finance minister.
In a note shortly after polls closed on Sunday evening, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, noted that Italy’s mountain of public debt – estimated at around 150% of GDP – was “vulnerable to negative growth, at the cost of financing and the evolution of inflation”.
Despite all the intense international attention on the outcome, Italians themselves were less than enthusiastic about the election, reflecting their growing disenchantment with the political process.
The final turnout was just 64%, significantly lower than the previous high of 73% in 2018.
“The perception is whether you vote or not, nothing really changes and all politicians are equal,” said Valerio Alfonso Bruno, a fellow at Britain’s Center for Radical Right Analysis. “A lot of Italians see politics this way, that if we have Meloni this time, really nothing new will happen.”
The right-wing coalition has promised Italians they will deliver five years of stable and effective government, something that has long eluded the country. But despite the bloc’s apparent comfortable majority, analysts have warned of turbulence following personal rivalries between the three leadersespecially the fading of Salvini’s resentment towards the ascendant Meloni.
“I don’t think we’ll have another election anytime soon, but we’re going to see constant fighting,” Albertazzi said. “Government life is highly unlikely to be quiet and simple.”
Before the polls opened, Donald Trump’s close political ally and former lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted his support for Meloni and Salvini, expressing hope that “Italians will choose them to wisely guide their nation and return Italy to new great”.
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