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ROME — Italy appeared to turn a page of European history on Sunday by electing a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, whose long record of bashing the European Union, international bankers and migrants has sown concern about the nation’s reliability in the Western alliance.
Early projections based on a narrow sampling of precincts, as well as exit polls, on Sunday night suggested that Ms. Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of fascism, had led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament, defeating a fractured left and a resurgent anti-establishment movement.
The final results would not be clear until Monday, and it will still be weeks before the new Italian parliament is seated and a new government is formed, leaving plenty of time for political machinations. But Ms. Meloni’s strong showing, with about 25 percent of the vote, the highest of any single party, makes her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister.
While she is a strong supporter of Ukraine, her coalition partners deeply admire Russia’s President, Vladimir V. Putin, and have criticized sanctions against Russia.
The victory, in an election with lower turnout than usual, comes as formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or fascist heritages are entering the mainstream — and winning elections — across Europe.
This month, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. In France this year, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of presidential elections. In Spain, the hard-right Vox, a party closely aligned with Ms. Meloni, is surging.
But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union, that has sent the strongest shock wave across the continent after a period of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia.
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Ms. Meloni’s victory showed that the allure of nationalism — of which she is a strong advocate — remained undimmed, despite the breakthroughs by E.U. nations in coming together to pool sovereignty and resources in recent years, first to combat the coronavirus pandemic and then Mr. Putin’s initiation of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
How, and how deeply, a right-wing coalition in Italy led by Ms. Meloni could threaten that cohesion is now the foremost concern of the European establishment.
Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners — Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda.
That fracture, and the bitter competition between the right-wing leaders, could prove fatal for the coalition, leading to a short-lived government. But some political analysts say Ms. Meloni, having attained power, may be tempted to soften her support for sanctions, which are unpopular in much of Italy.
If she does, there is concern that Italy could be the weak link that breaks the European Union’s strong united position against Russia.
Ms. Meloni had spent the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that her support of Ukraine was unwavering. She sought to allay concerns by condemning Mussolini, whom she once admired, and Italy’s Fascist past. She also made more supportive noises about Italy’s place in the European Union and distanced herself from Ms. Le Pen and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, whom she had previously emulated.
Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s party, organized an electoral vigil on Sunday night in a lavish, underground conference room at Parco dei Principi, a grand hotel in Rome near Villa Borghese. The hotel — with neon-lit stucco ceilings and a marble bust of the Roman emperor Caracalla — was where the Five Star Movement greeted the news of its landslide election in 2018.
Guido Crosetto, a senior member of the Brothers of Italy, had one word to describe his mood as he climbed up the staircase out of a secluded room where party members followed the election on television.
“Nervous,” he said.
Supporters brought in cake, red peppers for good luck and “energy,” and green, red and white T-shirts as the first exit polls were projected on large screens, showing Ms. Meloni’s party getting between 22 and 25 percent of the vote.
A timid applause came out of the room and, shortly after, a waiter carried in a large bucket of ice.
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ROME — Dozens of photographers packed into the back of a small classroom waiting for Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader favored to become Italy’s prime minister after national elections on Sunday, to come in and cast her vote.
Her party had announced that she would be there at 11 a.m. Her spokeswomen were there. The Italian and international news media showed up. But Ms. Meloni didn’t.
In a statement, her office blamed all of the journalists who showed up and said that Ms. Meloni would vote later Sunday so as not to obstruct “the right to vote in peace.”
But if Ms. Meloni didn’t make it, her voters did.
“I’ve voted for her and the right since the times of Almirante,” said Paola Puglisi, 65, referring to Giorgio Almirante, an official in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed puppet state who after World War II formed and led the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, which Ms. Meloni joined in her youth. Her Brothers of Italy still carries the defunct party’s torch.
Ms. Puglisi said she was proud to live close to Ms. Meloni in an area near the EUR neighborhood of the Italian capital that Mussolini built as a modern imperial Rome.
“It’s going to be a big change, having a woman for the first time but also for the right,” Ms. Puglisi said. “It’s a turning point.”
Not everyone in Ms. Meloni’s home precinct liked the way things were heading.
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Federica Lombardi, 25, and her sister Emanuela Lombardi, 23, spoke to each other in a mix of English and Italian. Having attended international schools and lived in Washington, and now residing in London and Madrid, they said they moved in liberal bubbles that popped when they came home to vote for the center-left Democratic Party.
“Here, we are a minority vote, and it probably will be nationwide,” said Federica Lombardi, who works for a human rights law firm in London. She said she had doubts about Ms. Meloni’s sincerity when it came to her softened position on Europe. “I don’t buy it,” she said. “It’s political positioning.”
Her sister, who works in the luxury fashion industry in Madrid, said she was most concerned about Ms. Meloni’s effect on social issues.
“There’s this archaic vision that because she is a woman, she will be good for women,” especially on abortion rights, Emanuela Lombardi said. She said she worried that Ms. Meloni’s emphasis on preventing abortions acted as an “underlying judgment.” More generally, Emanuela Lombardi feared that electing someone from “the remnants of fascism” would ultimately validate long-taboo ideas. “I’m worried we will be going back many years,” she said.
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CAGLIARI, Sardinia — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots and the favorite to become Italy’s next prime minister, is known for her rhetorical crescendos, thundering timbre and ferocious speeches slamming gay-rights lobbies, European bureaucrats and illegal migrants.
But she was suddenly soft-spoken when asked on a recent evening if she agreed, all caveats aside, with the historical consensus that the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini — whom she admired in her youth as a “good politician” — had been evil and bad for Italy.
“Yeah,” she said, almost inaudibly, between sips of an Aperol Spritz and drags on a thin cigarette during an interview in Sardinia, where she had completed another high-decibel political rally.
That simple syllable spoke volumes about Ms. Meloni’s campaign to reassure a global audience as she appears poised to become the first politician with a post-Fascist lineage to run Italy since the end of World War II.
Such a feat seemed unimaginable not so long ago, and to pull it off, Ms. Meloni — who would also make history as the first woman to lead Italy — is balancing on a high-stakes wire, persuading her hard-right base of “patriots” that she hasn’t changed, while seeking to convince international skeptics that she’s no extremist, that the past is past, not prologue, and that Italy’s mostly moderate voters trust her, so they should, too.
Some of the competition on the ballots include Enrico Letta, 56, a former prime minister, who is the leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Democratic Party, which runs in a coalition with a series of small, pro-European, environmentalist and more leftist parties. And the once anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which runs alone, is led by Giuseppe Conte, 58, who was also Italy’s former prime minister when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in Italy.
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
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VERONA, Italy — In southern Italy, Giuseppe Conte, the leader of the Five Star Movement, rallied crowds recently around his promise to uphold the citizens’ income — the party’s trademark subsidy for low-income, jobless Italians. But at a polling station on Sunday in Italy’s north, many hoped to never hear about the policy again.
“The citizens’ income thing I really could not swallow,” said Claudia Orlandi as she jumped in a car after casting her ballot for the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, led by Giorgia Meloni, which was leading the polls in Sunday’s election.
She said that she had just returned from vacation in the south, where “entrepreneurs could not find workers because everyone was at the bar living off handouts.”
The citizens’ income program, a welfare benefit introduced by the Five Star Movement in 2019, was aimed at supporting low-income Italians looking for work. Since then it has almost always been at the center of the political debate. Its supporters praise it as a powerful weapon against poverty, but its critics deem it a handout to lazy people and an engine of greater poverty.
The vast majority of the policy’s beneficiaries are in the poorer south, and as Italians went to the polls, the issue was again polarizing the electorate, especially along a north-south divide.
Some 12 percent of the population receives the monthly payment, on average about 600 euros, in Naples’s Campania region, while only 1 percent in the northern Veneto region get the benefit. Reports of scams have prompted outrage. The right has campaigned on the promise of eliminating the program that to them has left business owners scrambling to find employees, while potential job candidates preferred to relax at home, supported by the state.
Mr. Conte rejected the reputation of the “party of the south,” saying that there were people in the north who got the benefit, too, and attacked those who “make war to the poor” by attacking a measure that helps Italians going through hardship. Not everyone agreed.
“They should give money to those who need it, not to 20-year-old boys who could very well go work,” said Luigia Piacenza, 80, as she walked home from the polling station in Verona where she had just cast her ballot for Ms. Meloni’s party. She said she had consistently voted for the left, but this time she hoped for a change.
As they cycled back from the polling station, Sonia Fazioni and her husband said they had little hope anything would change, whatever the outcome of the election. But if there was one thing they really wanted the new government to do, it was to eradicate what they called a culture of dependency on the state. Ms. Fazioni said she cast her ballot for Ms. Meloni and the Brothers of Italy.
“She will get rid of the citizens’ income,” Ms. Fazioni said.
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Exit polls should come out the night of the vote, but since voting places close at 11 p.m. on Sunday, no official results are expected to be declared until Monday. Even once the results are known, Italy will not have a new prime minister for weeks.
The new members of Parliament will be confirmed and convened in Rome in the middle of October. They will then elect the speaker of the Senate and of the lower house, and party leaders for each house.
The president, Sergio Mattarella, will then begin consultations with the speakers of both houses and with the parties’ representatives. The coalition that won the most votes will designate their candidate for premiership. If their candidate is able to win a majority in the newly elected Parliament, the president will appoint a potential prime minister to form a new government.
Should Brothers of Italy win the most votes, as is expected, it would be difficult for its coalition of parties to justify a prime minister other than Giorgia Meloni.
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VERONA, Italy — Like many in the northern Italian region of Veneto where she lives, Patrizia Bressan, a private-school teacher, had consistently voted for Matteo Salvini and his League party. She liked how he vowed to stop immigration and sided with business owners. But this time, she voted for Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party, which is now leading in the polls.
“Salvini really let me down,” said Ms. Bressan, 64, as she walked out of a school in Verona where she had just cast her ballot. “And it would be so good to have a woman.”
The League party, born as a secessionist party in the north, for decades counted regions like Veneto as electoral strongholds. In 2018, it had 30 percent of the vote in Veneto, while the Brothers of Italy had about 4 percent. Now, the tables have turned, with Ms. Meloni’s party at 30 percent of the vote in the region, according to recent polls, twice as much as the League.
If those numbers are confirmed in the election, a victory for the Brothers of Italy and Ms. Meloni in Veneto would be “astounding,” a political analyst, Lorenzo Pregliasco, said on Italian television this month. “We have been used to considering the League as an hegemonic party there.” A shift in Veneto could be perhaps the starkest evidence of Ms. Meloni’s takeover of the right, and of the decline of her coalition partner, and onetime nationalist darling, Mr. Salvini.
Ms. Bressan said that she — and her whole family — switched from the League to Brothers of Italy because of Mr. Salvini’s participation in Mario Draghi’s government. She said the current government forced her to get a coronavirus vaccine to go to work, and that Mr. Draghi put ahead the “interests of banks and finance instead of those of the people.” She said she felt betrayed by Mr. Salvini participating in it.
“He went hand in hand with them,” she said. “He should have stayed out of it.”
Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has benefited from being the only major party not participating in Mr. Draghi’s government. It has remained in the opposition for the past five years. Mr. Salvini and his party were involved in two government coalitions, with Mr. Draghi and with the populist Five Star Movement before that.
“How can you make an alliance with the Five Star?” asked Carla Botta, 68, a retired teacher who also ditched the League for Ms. Meloni’s party on Sunday.
“Salvini did things that were really not OK,” she said. “Meloni has always been consistent with her ideas.”
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Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president and highest-ranking figure, usually has a ceremonial role and acts as the country’s prime authority. But during elections and periods of crisis, Mr. Mattarella is imbued with enormous powers that make him the gatekeeper of Italian democracy.
Mr. Mattarella, 81, has, for example, the authority to assess whether the leader of the winning coalition can gain enough support in Parliament to form a government, and if so, he will appoint him or her as prime minister.
The president of Italy, even in a ceremonial role, represents the unity of the republic, commands the army, oversees magistrates, and evaluates laws’ constitutionality and promulgates them. But more recently, presidents have emerged as guarantors of the country’s institutions amid political instability and populist pressure.
Indeed, Mr. Mattarella and the president who served before him, Giorgio Napolitano, have been called on to make critical decisions.
Mr. Mattarella, for example, after elections in 2018, refused to appoint the choice of an economy minister by the nascent populist-nationalist government because of the nominee’s Euroskeptic positions. That prompted the parties to call for the president’s impeachment, before they ultimately caved and named someone else.
Polls indicate that Mr. Mattarella, one of only two Italian presidents to be asked to serve a second term, is the most respected political figure in a country that has little trust in its politicians.
Mr. Mattarella was born in Palermo, Sicily, into a family of politicians. His older brother, Piersanti Mattarella, was killed in a mafia attack in 1980, when he was governor of the region. A former parliamentary law professor and Christian-Democratic lawmaker, Sergio Mattarella became a Constitutional Court judge in 2011.
In January, when Mr. Mattarella’s seven-year mandate was expiring, his intent appeared to be move near his children’s family and his grandchildren. He was photographed visiting apartments in Rome, and had even moved some of his furniture to a flat in a residential neighborhood just outside of the Aurelian walls. But a hung Parliament could not reach a political agreement to elect a new president, and party leaders asked him to stay on.
He obliged.
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FLORENCE, Italy — As Italians headed to the polls on Sunday in one of the historical bastions of the left, the region of Tuscany, voters appeared to be turning out mainly to thwart a large victory for the hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy.
“I took a train from Milan to vote for the Democratic Party,” said Guido Tommaso, 29, a Florentine doctor who lives in Milan, nearly 200 miles north of Florence. “Considering the situation and the risk of a landslide victory for the right, I didn’t hesitate at all.”
Mr. Tommaso is one of the Florentines who cast their ballots only steps away from the city’s famous baptistery and cathedral, in a region that for decades has traditionally voted for the left.
“I don’t feel there is a party that really represents me, but I am a leftist and voted for the left coalition,” said Viola Filippini, 28, a goldsmith. “A victory for the right would be terrible.”
A few miles from the city center, in a working-class neighborhood tucked between the Arno River and the city’s airport, where support for Italy’s Communist Party — and then the Democratic Party — in previous years would reach up to 75 percent, voters on Sunday seemed more inclined to vote for smaller, more extreme parties in the leftist coalition, or even outside of it.
“I always voted for the reds,” Tiziana Guidi Rontani, 64, an office cleaner, said, referring to the Communist Party and the Democrats.
Noisy jets flew above the primary school that housed the polling place, while Ms. Guidi Rontani retrieved her dogs’ leashes from her daughter Francesca Lombardo, who had accompanied her but had not entered the polling station. Ms. Lombardo said she hadn’t cast a vote for two decades.
Ms. Guidi Rontani said that she still believed in the electoral process and that she’d voted for the Left and Greens, hoping to see some real leftist policies for working people like her.
Despite expressing deep-seated disillusionment with politics, younger voters in Florence said their family histories meant they couldn’t even conceive of voting for the right.
Margherita Arriti, 28, a university student, joked that she didn’t know how to tell her grandfather that she’d voted for a small leftist party that had not joined the left coalition.
“In his culture,” she said, “that’s a wasted vote.”
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When Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to become Italy’s next prime minister, said on Italian TV this month that she opposed adoption by gay couples and that having a mother and a father was best for a child, Luigi, 6, overheard her and asked his father about it.
“I wasn’t able to answer very well,” said his father, Francesco Zaccagnini. “I said they are not happy with how we love each other.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Zaccagnini, 44, who works for a labor union in the Tuscan city of Pisa and is a gay father, went door to door asking friends and acquaintances to vote in Sunday’s elections to oppose Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy.
“My family is at stake,” he said.
Mr. Zaccagnini and his partner had Luigi and their 6-month-old daughter, Livia, with two surrogate mothers who live in the United States. In her election campaign, Ms. Meloni pledged to oppose surrogacy and adoption by gay couples. As a member of Parliament, she submitted an amendment to a law that would extend a ban on surrogacy in Italy to Italians who seek the method abroad. It has not yet been approved by Parliament.
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Italy is already an outlier in Western Europe in terms of gay rights — gay marriage is still not recognized by law — but the possibility of Ms. Meloni taking power has prompted fears among gay families that things might get worse.
In 2016, Parliament passed a law recognizing civil unions of same-sex couples despite opposition by the Roman Catholic Church, which is influential in Italy.
Gay parents remain cut off from the main avenues for adoption, which require a marriage rather than a civil union. And with surrogacy banned and in vitro fertilization only allowed for heterosexual couples, gay couples are effectively forced to travel abroad to become parents, and to navigate complicated — and case by case — paths through bureaucracy, courts and social services.
“We hoped that the country would go forward,” said Alessia Crocini, the president of Rainbow Families, an association of gay families. “But we have a dark period ahead.”
Ms. Meloni has said that civil unions are good enough for gay couples. She has also repeatedly said that she is not homophobic, and that she is not going to alter existing civil rights, but that what is best for a child is to have both a mother and a father. Her surrogacy proposal scared many gay parents, as did her tone and emphasis on what constitutes a family.
“It gives homophobes an excuse and a political support,” Ms. Crocini said.
Ms. Meloni has decried what she calls “gender ideology” as aimed at the disappearance of women as mothers, and opposes the teaching of such ideas in schools.
Ms. Crocini said she worried that her son, 8, saying he has two mothers at school might be considered gender ideology.
She has some reason to think that. Federico Mollicone, the culture spokesman for Ms. Meloni’s party, recently urged the Italian state broadcaster RAI not to air an episode of the popular cartoon “Peppa Pig” that featured a bear with two mothers, calling it “gender indoctrination,” and claiming that young children should not see gay adoption presented as something “natural” or “normal, because it’s not.”
Last year, Ms. Meloni campaigned to make surrogacy a “universal crime,” using a picture of a child with a bar code on its hand.
Mr. Zaccagnini said he was scared his son would see such images and messages if they kept circulating. Despite his instinct to stay in Italy and fight, Mr. Zaccagnini said he had been thinking about relocating abroad.
“My son this year will start reading,” he said. “I need to protect him somehow.”
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Italian politicians are on a virtual hunt for undecided voters.
Over the summer, as polls suggested that most of those who had not yet picked a side were under 30, party elders took it to the next level: TikTok.
This month, Silvio Berlusconi, 85, who served four times as Italy’s prime minister, landed on the social media platform that is mostly popular among the young, explaining why he was there at his age.
“On this platform, you guys are over five million, and 60 percent of you are less than 30. I am a little envious,” Mr. Berlusconi said, raising and lowering his voice for dramatic effect. “We will talk about your future.”
The video had 9.6 million views, raising eyebrows among some users.
“You are not so stupid that a video on TikTok is enough to vote for you,” said Emma Galeotti, a young TikTok content creator. “You send the message that we, young people, are so malleable and bonkers.”
But Mr. Berlusconi’s communications team did not give up. His profile is brimming with a mix of snapshots from his TV appearances and classic Berlusconi jokes, as well as political messages recorded in his studio, where he is seen wearing classy blue suits — and often ties.
Viewers have taken notice of his cultivated appearance.
“What’s your foundation cream?” one asked. “The cream is too orange, more natural tones are better,” another wrote.
“The rebound was comic or grotesque, but being on TikTok allowed him to be central to the electoral debate,” said Annalisa Ferretti, the coordinator of the social media division at the Italian advocacy group FB & Associati, who noted that the number of people following Mr. Berlusconi’s profile had surpassed 3.2 million in three weeks.
“The problem is that this generation rejects the political class overall,” she said, adding that such social media popularity did not directly translate into votes.
Other politicians have chosen different paths. Matteo Salvini, 49, of the far-right League party, who has been on TikTok for years and has 635,600 followers, uses the platform mostly as a mouthpiece for his meat-and-bone topics — security and immigration.
Giorgia Meloni, 45, the leader of Brothers of Italy and possibly the next prime minister, does not seem to be doing as well on TikTok, despite her successful electoral campaign. She has 197,700 followers.
University students seem to like the leader of the centrist party Action, Carlo Calenda, 49, who posts short political messages, answers questions received on the platform and discusses books, Ms. Ferretti said. But he has only about 24,300 followers.
The center-left Democratic Party is the only party that offers a plurality of voices on TikTok. They post thematic videos with topics discussed by politicians who are the symbol of such issues, like Alessandro Zan, 48, for the civil rights battle. Enrico Letta, 56, a party leader, recently encouraged users to go vote — for whomever they liked. “The others should not decide for your future,” he said.
Despite the efforts of politicians to reach a different audience, abstention still seems to be the main threat to the parties, and to Italian democracy.
“They used to say, ‘Squares are full and the ballot boxes are empty,’” Ms. Ferretti said. “Now it’s more social media is full, and the ballot boxes are empty.”
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ROME — The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini envisioned the EUR neighborhood of Rome as a modern and grand version of imperial Rome. A centerpiece of it was the elegant and imposing Palace of Italian Civilization, built by the Fascist-era architects to echo the arches of the original Colosseum.
When in 2019 Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right candidate favored to win Sunday’s election, welcomed another one of Mussolini’s relatives, Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, as a candidate in her party, she did it in a video on the palace’s steps.
On Sunday, Viviana Verticchio, a 38-year-old architect, walked out of a polling station just under the gleaming building. She had submitted a blank ballot to protest politicians that she said were all terrible.
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“They are the refuse of the last 20 years of politics still floating around,” she said, adding that the formal blank vote would prevent her support from going to Ms. Meloni, whom she did not like. But, Ms. Verticchio added, she was the only one who “had never had the chance to govern.”
A few meters away, supporters of Ms. Meloni said lack of experience left her untainted.
“She’s the only politician running who loves Italy — the others are in it for themselves,” said Stefano Ferretti, 48, a driver, who pointed at the elegant six-story cube, perforated by 216 arches. “The six floors up the side are for B E N I T O,” he said, pointing and spelling out the name. Across the arches are for M U S S O L I N I.”
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He said that more than any specific policy, he liked Ms. Meloni’s character. And while he agreed with her that Ukraine needed to be helped, he agreed more with her coalition partners, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, both of whom are great admirers of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, when it came to sanctions on Russia and sending arms to Ukraine.
“I think we should put the question up to the Italians in a referendum,” Mr. Ferretti said. “Let’s see if they really want it.”
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A 2021 referendum shrunk the Italian Parliament by a third, and that may make it even more difficult for smaller parties, often representing specific interests, to win one of the 600 seats up for grabs.
For one thing, not all of the 35 parties vying in Sunday’s elections have candidates running in every district.
The Free party, for example, is only vying in Lombardy, putting up candidates for four lower house seats. Marco Lusetti, the leader of the party, said it would be “impossible” to win this round against better-funded, better-organized parties. But his movement is playing the long game, he said, knowing there is a growing constituency of disaffected Italians. The party’s logo is a silhouette of a man kicking a Pinocchio head.
“Our intent is to banish the corrupt, the swindlers and liars from the Italian panorama,” he said, alluding to those working in the country’s judiciary, news media and politics.
It’s the first time running in national polls for the Italian Animalist Party, one of several animal rights parties that make up Animal Politics EU. Its leader, Cristiano Ceriello, said he hoped to lure animal rights advocates to the polls — normally an untapped electorate “because almost always they tend to abstain, they don’t see their interests reflected in traditional groups.”
It’s a potentially huge base, he said, and diverse, including vegetarians, vegans and animal lovers who care for strays, as well as people who want European Union subsidies to shift from livestock to plant-based agriculture. “We’re fishing in a pool of people who don’t always vote.”
But there are other options, too. Among its electoral promises, the Party of Creative Folly guarantees a condom in every pot, as well as “courtship lessons” to better respect women. Celebrities have also been co-opted to get traction, including Gina Lollobrigida, the 95-year-old former movie star on the ballot south of Rome with the Sovereign and Popular Italy party, which wants Italy out of the E.U. and the euro, NATO and the World Health Organization, but is also against “the politically correct, which cancels history and culture.” Among her listed credentials: “international movie star” and Star 2628 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
As the name suggests, the party Italexit for Italy also hopes to attract voters who want nothing more to do with the European Union. It later broadened to incorporate protest against mandatory vaccines and coronavirus restrictions. The party’s leader, Gianluigi Paragone, was elected to the Senate in 2018 with the Five Star Movement, which later expelled him after he refused to accept the party’s alliance with the leftist Democratic Party.
He said that part of his support came from Five Star voters; initially an anti-establishment movement, the party has been hemorrhaging votes since a triumph in the 2018 elections.
In Italy’s mixed parliamentary election procedures, some seats are allocated by proportional representation and a party winning 3 percent of the national vote gains a seat. Polls suggest that Italexit could cross that threshold, and thus may eke into Parliament.
But on Sunday, most small parties are likely to go home empty-handed.
“People stop me on the street and say, ‘You’re not going to make it, so why should I give you my move?’ And I tell them, ‘I guess it depends on what you mean by making it,’” said Mr. Lusetti of the Free party. “Just the fact that we are present in the elections with our symbol, we have already won.”
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Italians will go to the polls on Sunday five months ahead of schedule and vote under a complex electoral law put into effect in 2017.
The system was first used in 2018, in an election that did not produce an outright winner and ultimately led to three governments being formed in just over four years. But in July, that third government, led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, fell, prompting this snap election.
Things will be a little different this time, however. Italians have taken steps in recent years to change the makeup of their Parliament to streamline legislative procedures and cut costs. In September 2020, they voted in a referendum to reduce the legislative body by a third — reducing the members in the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, to 400, from 630, and members in the upper house, the Senate, to 200, from 315. The reductions caused electoral districts to be redrawn across the country.
Voters receive one ballot paper for each house of Parliament, but the votes are interpreted using a mixed system.
For the Chamber of Deputies, 61 percent of the seats are distributed by proportional representation, meaning that they are allocated according to the percentage of votes a party receives nationally. Another 37 percent are allocated on a winner-take-all system by district, with the seat going to the candidate who takes the most votes in each district.
Parties running without allies have to reach a threshold of 3 percent of the vote nationally to get proportionally allocated seats, with a higher threshold for groups of parties running together as a coalition; in that case, the coalition has to reach 10 percent of the vote for its members to be assigned seats in this part of the system.
Two percent of the seats are for overseas constituencies. And parties that represent linguistic minorities have a lower threshold because they do not have to be present nationally.
Senate seats are also distributed in this mixed-system manner, but with a region-by-region system of proportional representation instead of a national one. That raises the support threshold needed for a seat and penalizes smaller parties, which look to have the voting strength needed to enter the Senate only in three of Italy’s 20 regions.
“They could be underrepresented,” said Lorenzo De Sio, the director of the Italian Center of Electoral Studies.
In the single-member districts, the winner-takes-all system favors parties that run as part of a coalition, pooling their votes behind one common candidate in each district. That’s one reason to expect a solid majority for the right: A three-party coalition of Brothers of Italy, the League party and Forza Italia had 45 percent support in opinion polls two weeks ago, the last point at which Italian law allowed polling to be published.
The main center-left party, the Democrats, was unable to cobble together a coalition with other center-left parties or the once anti-establishment Five Star Movement.
“But there are always unknowns,” Mr. De Sio said.
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Despite the broad popularity of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a Eurocentric moderate, it is the populist-infused right, with a recent history of belligerence toward Europe, that has had a clear edge in the polls going into the election on Sunday.
Most popular of all has been the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, led by Giorgia Meloni, whose support skyrocketed as it was the only major party to remain in the opposition. If she does as well as expected, she is poised to be Italy’s first female prime minister.
Ms. Meloni is aligned with the anti-immigrant and hard-right League party, led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia, the center-right party founded and still led by the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Italy’s election law favors parties that run in a coalition, and so the coalition on the right has an advantage over the fragmented left.
The largest party on the left, the Democratic Party, is polling around 22 percent. Ms. Meloni’s support has polled at around 25 percent, but the right is expected to gain many more seats in Parliament, the basis upon which the government is composed.
The once anti-establishment Five Star Movement has cratered from its strong showing in 2018, when it had more than 30 percent of the vote. After participating in three different governments spanning the political spectrum, it has lost its identity. Now headed by the former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, it has opted to run alone. In recent weeks, its poll numbers have climbed, thanks to support in the south, which is rewarding the party for passing, and then defending, a broad unemployment benefit.
A centrist party called Azione, led by a former minister, Carlo Calenda, and backed by another former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, would claim a moral victory even if it only hit 6 or 7 percent.
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Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy remained extremely popular when his government collapsed.
It fell in July, not because Mr. Draghi lost popular support, or even because he lost his majority in Parliament, but because a symbolic revolt in his national unity government convinced him that the conditions were no longer in place for him — a technocrat appointed to guide a broad coalition — to govern effectively.
As a result, Mr. Draghi, deeply respected in Europe and widely credited with improving Italy’s global influence and economic outlook, tendered his resignation. The country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, told him he first had to go back and explain his decision to Parliament, perhaps hoping Mr. Draghi would persuade everyone to come back together.
But Mr. Draghi’s speech was far from conciliatory, and in the knifey world of Italian politics, ambitious coalition partners anxious for early elections looked at his resignation and angry speech as a gift from the electoral gods. They seized their opportunity to tank the government without taking the blame and bolted. At that point, the country’s president accepted Mr. Draghi’s resignation, asking him to stay on until the next government was seated, most likely at the end of October.
In that time, he will have a limited caretaker capacity, with control over issues related to the pandemic, international affairs — including Ukraine policy — and the billions of euros in recovery funds from Europe. That money is delivered in tranches, and strict requirements need to be met before the funds are released.
Mr. Draghi’s supporters say his government would have ended in about five months anyway, as elections were scheduled at the end of Parliament’s current five-year term. But critics say the way Mr. Draghi ended — essentially crashing the car into the garage — raised unnecessary concerns about Italian stability that hurt the country in a precarious time.
Supporters of Mr. Draghi acknowledged that new overhauls on major problems like pensions were now off the table, but they argued that the recovery funds were more or less safe because no government, not even a hard-right populist one, would walk away from all of that money, and so would follow through on Mr. Draghi’s vision for modernization funded by those euros.
But if the July collapse showed anything, it is that political calculations sometimes outweigh the national interest.
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ROME — Pollsters call it the “party of the non-vote,” potential electors who stay away from the polls. On Sunday, up to a third of the Italian population is expected to abstain.
That compares with turnout in other Western democracies. In the 2020 United States presidential election, for example, roughly 66 percent of eligible Americans voted.
But in Italy, it is a sign of the continued decline in voter participation, which hovered above 90 percent until 40 years ago, and only dipped into the 70s a decade ago.
The reasons for abstentions are multiple, experts say, and have to do with a more fluid electoral landscape unconstrained by the strong ideology that marked Italian politics in the decades after World War II. Another factor is general disenchantment with politics, which makes not voting a kind of protest in itself.
Voter turnout in the early years of the Italian Republic, from 1948 until 1979, was especially high “because voting was an expression of faith,” said Fabio Bordignon, a political scientist at the University of Urbino. That faith was religious, with the Christian Democratic Party co-opting much of the Catholic vote, and it was ideological, via strong support for the Italian Communist Party.
“It was an era in which voting was also the expression of conflict in a deeply divided society where well-organized parties were able to mobilize high levels of participation,” Mr. Bordignon said.
Today, the situation has changed. Political parties are weaker and the electoral landscape is not as rigid. “People change their votes from election to election,” he said. “And in this landscape, voting or not voting is one choice among others.”
A recent study by a professor at the University of Bologna found that younger people were more inclined to skip voting, especially those in the lowest income brackets with a lower level of education and particularly in Italy’s poorer, southern regions.
Many said they felt “disillusioned because the youth theme is absent from a debate that for years has been dominated by policies for Italy’s aging population,” said Riccardo Cesari, who carried out the study.
“Young people don’t see politics as a solution” to their problems, he said.
The same could be said for women, who are expected to abstain more than men, according to Nando Pagnoncelli, the president of Ipsos in Italy.
“Women don’t feel represented by the parties,” said Giorgia Serughetti, a professor at the University of Milan Bicocca who writes about women’s issues. “In many years they have not had any concrete answers to a situation that sees them underemployed and poorer than men, both when it comes to salaries and lower pensions.”
Their decision not to vote “is a protest that should be read in these terms,” she said.
from
https://clarkcountynewsnow.com/italy-elections-live-giorgia-melonis-hard-right-party-leads-in-voting-the-new-york-times/
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