Voters shift sharply to the right

Early results show far-right party Brothers of Italy poised for victory in national election

Italian voters shifted sharply, rewarding a party with neo-fascist roots and bolstering prospects the country could have its first far-right-led government since the Second World War, partial results Monday from the election for Parliament indicated.

In a victory speech, far-right Italian leader Giorgia Meloni struck a moderate tone after preliminary results in Sunday’s national election showed her Brothers of Italy party leading contenders.

“If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone, we will do it for all Italians and we will do it with the aim of uniting the people (of this country),” Meloni said at her party’s Rome headquarters.

“Italy chose us,” she said. “We will not betray (the country) as we never have.”

As polls in the run up to Sunday’s vote showed her as the likely winner, Meloni has moderated her farright message in an apparent attempt to reassure the European Union and other international partners.

“This is the time for being responsible,” Meloni said, appearing live on television and describing the situation for Italy and the European Union is “particularly complex.”

The formation of a ruling coalition with the help of right-wing allies of her Brothers of Italy party could take weeks. If Meloni, 45, succeeds, she would be the first woman to hold the country’s premiership. A mandate to try to form a government must be given by Italy’s president.

She thanked her main campaign allies and the likely partners essential to her forming a government: anti-migrant League leader Matteo Salvini and conservative former premier Silvio Berlusconi. Apparently headed for a drubbing in the voting was the euro-skeptic Salvini, who had hoped to become premier.

Projections based on votes counted from nearly two-thirds of the polling stations in Sunday’s balloting indicated Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party would win some 25.7 per cent of the vote.

That compared to some 19.3 per cent by the closest challenger, the center-left Democratic Party of former premier Enrico Letta. Salvini’s League was projected to win 8.6 per cent of the ballots, roughly half of what he garnered in the last 2018 election.

The projections on Italian state TV had a margin of error range of 2-5 percentage points.

Meloni’s strong showing heartened her allies in Europe who are intent on shifting the European Union’s politics sharply to the right.

Fellow Euroskeptic politicians were among the first to celebrate. Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, congratulated Meloni in a tweet. French politician Marine Le Pen’s party also hailed the result as a “lesson in humility” to the EU.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox opposition party, celebrated Meloni’s lead, tweeting that “millions of Europeans are placing their hopes in Italy.” She “has shown the way for a proud and free Europe of sovereign nations that can co-operate on behalf of everybody’s security and prosperity.”

Meloni’s meteoric rise in the European Union’s third-largest economy comes at a critical time, as much of the continent reels under soaring energy bills, a repercussion of the war in Ukraine, and the West’s resolve to stand united against Russian aggression is being tested. In the last election, in 2018, Meloni’s party took 4.4 per cent .

Tabulating paper ballots was expected to last well into Monday.

More than one-third of the 50.9 million eligible voters deserted the balloting. Final turnout was 64 per cent , according to the Interior Ministry. That is far lower than the previous record for low turnout, 73 per cent in 2018’s last election.

Meloni’s party was forged from the legacy of a neo-fascist party formed shortly after the war by nostalgists of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

The Democrats went into the vote at a steep disadvantage since they failed to secure a similarly broad alliance with left-leaning populists and centrists. Italy has had three coalition governments since the last election — each led by someone who hadn’t run for office, and that appeared to have alienated many voters, pollsters had said. The election was being held six months early after Premier Mario Draghi’s pandemic unity government collapsed in late July.