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Elections: Italy’s government boosted as the right fails to take Tuscany in key vote

Italy's right took three more seats, meaning it now rules 15 out of the 20 Italian regions. But it wasn't able to snatch Tuscany despite a hard-fought battle.

Published: 22 September 2020 10:06 CEST
Elections: Italy's government boosted as the right fails to take Tuscany in key vote
A voter in Rome on Sunday. Photo: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP

A center-right coalition led by the once-powerful League leader Matteo Salvini won in three Italian regions but failed to snatch the left-wing stronghold of Tuscany, where the close-fought battle was seen as decisive for the country – and for Salvini.

READ ALSO: Why the rest of Italy is watching Tuscany's regional elections closely

The right triumphed instead in its usual strongholds of Veneto and Liguria, as well as taking Marche.

This means 15 of Italy's regions are now ruled by the right-wing coalition, which is made up of Salvini's league,  Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, and Fratelli d'Italia, led by Gioirgia Meloni.

But the defeat in the high-profile battle for the left-wing bastion of Tuscany, ruled by the left for 50 years, came as a blow for the right-wing coalition and a boost to the national government.

“It's an extraordinary victory,” the region's centre-left Democratic Party (PD) candidate Eugenio Giani said, as Salvini admitted “we knew it would be an extremely difficult fight”.
 
Experts had warned that a flurry of right-wing victories in the elections in seven regions could further fracture the brittle national governing coalition
of the centre-left PD and its ruling partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S).
 
In the southern region of Puglia too, the left fought off a bid by Giorgia Meloni's anti-immigration, anti-LGBT Brothers of Italy.
 
The left easily held Campania in the south.
 
 
“What could have been elections that hammered the coalition government, that caused it to break apart, have transformed into elections that will allow
it to survive and stay the course,” the Corriere della Sera's editor in chief Luciano Fontana said.
 
The two-day vote went ahead despite a threatened resurgence of the coronavirus in Italy, which is now registering more than 1,500 new cases daily.
 
Ballots were cast nationwide for a referendum on cutting parliament numbers, which passed easily.
 
 
A win in Tuscany would have bolstered the right's claim that the uneasy coalition was politically weak, and Italy's president should bring forward the 2023 national election.
 
The current government was not elected, but formed from the askes of the prevous government, which collapsed following a power grab by Matteo Salvini, whose party was formerly part of the coalition.
 
Salvini had hoped further victory at regional elections would push him back into the limelight and silenced his rivals for the far-right crown.
 
League head Matteo Salvini speaks to the media on Monday September 21st. Photo: Piero Cruciatti/AFP
 
His popularity soared when he served as interior minister and deputy prime minister in the last coalition government, pursuing hardline policies that were hostile to immigrants.
 
But with the collapse of that administration last year and the coronavirus crisis this year his profile – and his standing in the opinion polls – has
fallen. And Monday's results looked unlikely to lift it again.
 
“Salvini has been stopped in his tracks. The Tuscans did not fall for his propaganda,” Simona Bonafe, the PD's party leader in Tuscany where turnout was
62 percent, was quoted as saying by Florence-based newspaper La Nazione.
 
Giani's far-right rival in Tuscany, Susanna Ceccardi, was until recently known only to the inhabitants of Casina, a porticoed town near Pisa, which was
the first to turn to the League when she was elected mayor four years ago.
 
 
Since then, Renaissance art cities from Pisa to Siena in Tuscany have flipped to the right.
 
But the region has no glaring problems to drive a protest vote – the health system has performed well during the Covid-19 pandemic, immigrants are
well integrated, and the quality of life is high, political journalist Raffaele Palumbo told AFP.
 
Roberto Bianchi, contemporary history professor at Florence University, said the right has long tried to woo Tuscany — to little effect.
 
“In 2000, a frustrated Berlusconi even launched a campaign to 'de-Tuscanise Tuscany'. It was a disaster,” he said.

Member comments

  1. You have to laugh at Italian politics, the oppositions hold 15 out of the 20 regions yet the sitting governments feels much safer now that they won in Tuscany and will remain in power. What a crazy world we live in.

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POLITICS

Italy’s Meloni breaks silence on youth wing’s fascist comments

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday condemned offensive comments made by members of her far-right party's youth wing to an undercover journalist, breaking weeks of silence over the scandal.

Published: 28 June 2024 16:19 CEST
Italy's Meloni breaks silence on youth wing's fascist comments

The investigation published this month by Italian news website Fanpage included video of members of the National Youth, the junior wing of Brothers of Italy, which has post-fascist roots, showing support for Nazism and fascism.

In images secretly filmed by an undercover journalist in Rome, the members are seen performing fascist salutes, chanting the Nazi “Sieg Heil” greeting and shouting “Duce” in support of the late Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Opposition parties have been calling on Meloni to denounce the behaviour since the first part of the investigation aired on June 13.

Those calls intensified after a second part was published this week with fresh highly offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour.

READ ALSO: Italy’s ruling party shrugs off youth wing’s Fascist salutes

Party youths in particular mocked Ester Mieli, a Brothers of Italy senator and a former spokeswoman for Rome’s Jewish community.

“Whoever expresses racist, anti-Semitic or nostalgic ideas are in the wrong place, because these ideas are incompatible with Brothers of Italy,” Meloni told reporters in Brussels.

“There is no ambiguity from my end on the issue,” she said.

Two officials from the movement have stepped down over the investigation, which also caught one youth party member calling for the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein, to be “impaled”.

But Meloni also told off journalists for filming young people making offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour, saying they were “methods… of an (authoritarian) regime”.

Fanpage responded that it was “undercover journalism”.

Meloni was a teenage activist with the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by Mussolini supporters after World War II.

Brothers of Italy traces its roots to the MSI.

The most right-wing leader to take office since 1945, Meloni has sought to distance herself from her party’s legacy without entirely renouncing it. She kept the party’s tricolour flame logo – which was also used by MSI and inspired France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the far-right National Front party in 1972.

The logo’s base, some analysts say, represents Mussolini’s tomb, which tens of thousands of people visit every year.

Several high-ranking officials in the party do not shy away from their admiration of the fascist regime, which imposed anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

Brothers of Italy co-founder and Senate president Ignazio La Russa collects Mussolini statues.

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