Giorgia Meloni has seen her electoral position strengthened after the victory of her far-right formation Brothers of Italy in the regions of Lombardy and Lazio during the local elections held this weekend. Despite the fact that the elections lasted two days, Sunday and Monday, participation barely reached 41.61% in Lombardy and a paltry 37.71% in Lazio. In this way, the political (Lazio, with Rome) and economic (Lombardy, with Milan) centers of Italy will be governed in coalition by Meloni together with Forza Italia, by Silvio Berlusconi, and the League, by Matteo Salvini. In both regions, moreover, Meloni’s party has outperformed her coalition partners.
But the results do not reveal so much a support for the right as a very bad result of a left in the middle of a recomposition. The League’s candidate to preside over the Italian economic lung was Attilio Fontana, a politician without charisma and with questionable management of the coronavirus pandemic. It is necessary to remember that his region became the first major European focus of the disease. However, his candidacy devastated the left-wing parties, the Democratic Party (PD), in full refoundation and immersed in a process of primary elections, and the weakened 5-Star Movement, which after leaving the government does not seem to have regained confidence. of the voters. Even more significant is what happened in Lazio, governed by the center-left for 10 years and where the candidate of the Democratic Party, Alessio D’Amato, had 34% of the votes and Donatella Bianchi, from 5 Stars, 10.6%. .
Meloni hoped to recover political bellows in these elections after a month of setbacks both in domestic politics and in the international arena, particularly due to the rebuff that meant his exclusion from the dinner organized in Paris by Emmanuel Macron for the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, to which was also attended by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The issue has caused particular headaches for Berlusconi and his efforts to publicly defend Putin and attack the prime minister’s pro-Ukrainian position. Her results are positive for her, but they raise the uncertainty of a great disaffection with the system in one of the most important democracies in Europe. Above all, it concerns the inability of the left to mobilize its electorate and capitalize on discontent with the first far-right government in the history of the Republic of Italy.
