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ITALIAN ELECTIONS

MAP: How Italy turned ‘blue’ in Sunday’s historic elections

After Italy's right-wing alliance won a big majority in Italy's elections, maps show how the vote went in their favour across almost all parts of the country.

Published: 26 September 2022 17:46 CEST
Updated: 27 September 2022 12:51 CEST
MAP: How Italy turned 'blue' in Sunday's historic elections
Giorgia Meloni, Brothers of Italy party leader, is on course to become prime minister after a landslide election win for her coalition. Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP

Italy’s right-wing centrodestra coalition – led by the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, the populist League, and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – is set to form Italy’s next government, having swept to victory in elections on Sunday.

Taking almost 44 percent of the vote, the alliance is more than 18 percentage points ahead of its nearest rivals, the centre-left centrosinistra coalition, and will have a clear-cut majority in parliament.

READ ALSO: Triumph for Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party as Italy gets final election result

While Brothers of Italy and the League (formerly the Northern League) have their heartlands in northern Italy, they took seats almost everywhere in the country – in contrast to the north-south divide seen in 2018’s election result.

As various election result maps show, most of Italy is now ‘blue’ (the traditional colour of the right).

To get the most out of these visualisations, it helps to have a basic understanding of Italy’s notoriously complicated political system, so here’s a quick primer.

In a general election Italians get two votes, one for the senate and one for the lower house, and can vote for different parties in each if they wish.

Italy also has a fiendishly complicated hybrid voting system: about 37 percent of seats in both houses of parliament are allocated in a first-past-the-post vote in single-member constituencies, while the rest are elected by proportional representation via party lists of candidates.

That means some seats will be filled by candidates directly elected to represent their local constituency (i.e., the candidate with the most votes wins outright), with the rest divided proportionally between each party depending on their performance (i.e., a party with 20 percent of the votes gets 20 percent of the seats). Got that?

In these SkyTG24 live election result visualisations, the maps under the Circoscrizioni tab represent the results (so far) for proportional representation votes, while the maps under the Collegi tab show the results for first-past-the-post votes.

In the maps embedded above from Youtrend showing first-past-the-post results for the lower house (on the left) and the senate (on the right) on Monday morning, you can see that the majority of the country voted for the hard-right centrodestra coalition, shown in blue.

Just a few pockets in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany and in the north around Milan, Bolzano and Turin voted for the centre-left (red), with small areas of Campania, Puglia and Calabria voting for the populist Movimento 5 Stelle (yellow).

The maps for proportional representation are even more stark; here only a small electoral district around Naples is ‘yellow’, with the entire rest of the country turning blue.

Other visualisations also offer striking representations of Italy’s latest general election results.

Here you can see the distribution of votes for the right (on the left, in blue) versus the centre-left (right, in red):

And here is the difference in the distribution of votes received by Brothers of Italy in 2018 (when it won just four percent of the vote) versus 2022, when the party is set to win 26 percent:

Why did this happen? While it may look as though Italy has taken a sharp turn to the right, political analysts say strong support for the right in Italy has always been there, but was previously split.

Data shows Meloni likely drew much of her recent surge in support from Italy’s other right-wing parties, particularly the League, while many right-leaning supporters of Italy’s populist Five Star Movement also voted for the right-wing coalition this time.

A poor turnout in the south (and the lowest turnout historically in Italian election history) and the centre-left’s failure to form a strong coalition to fight the election is also thought to have contributed to the right’s landslide win.

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EUROPEAN UNION

Italian PM Meloni to stand in EU Parliament elections

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Sunday she would stand in upcoming European Parliament elections, a move apparently calculated to boost her far-right party, although she would be forced to resign immediately.

Published: 28 April 2024 15:54 CEST
Italian PM Meloni to stand in EU Parliament elections

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, which has neo-Fascist roots, came top in Italy’s 2022 general election with 26 percent of the vote.

It is polling at similar levels ahead of the European elections on from June 6-9.

With Meloni heading the list of candidates, Brothers of Italy could exploit its national popularity at the EU level, even though EU rules require that any winner already holding a ministerial position must immediately resign from the EU assembly.

“We want to do in Europe exactly what we did in Italy on September 25, 2022 — creating a majority that brings together the forces of the right to finally send the left into opposition, even in Europe!” Meloni told a party event in the Adriatic city of Pescara.

In a fiery, sweeping speech touching briefly on issues from surrogacy and Ramadan to artificial meat, Meloni extolled her coalition government’s one-and-a-half years in power and what she said were its efforts to combat illegal immigration, protect families and defend Christian values.

After speaking for over an hour in the combative tone reminiscent of her election campaigns, Meloni said she had decided to run for a seat in the European Parliament.

READ ALSO: How much control does Giorgia Meloni’s government have over Italian media?

“I’m doing it because I want to ask Italians if they are satisfied with the work we are doing in Italy and that we’re doing in Europe,” she said, suggesting that only she could unite Europe’s conservatives.

“I’m doing it because in addition to being president of Brothers of Italy I’m also the leader of the European conservatives who want to have a decisive role in changing the course of European politics,” she added.

In her rise to power, Meloni, as head of Brothers of Italy, often railed against the European Union, “LGBT lobbies” and what she has called the politically correct rhetoric of the left, appealing to many voters with her straight talk.

“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian” she famously declared at a 2019 rally.

She used a similar tone Sunday, instructing voters to simply write “Giorgia” on their ballots.

“I have always been, I am, and will always be proud of being an ordinary person,” she shouted.

EU rules require that “newly elected MEP credentials undergo verification to ascertain that they do not hold an office that is incompatible with being a Member of the European Parliament,” including being a government minister.

READ ALSO: Why is Italy’s government being accused of helping tax dodgers?

The strategy has been used before, most recently in Italy in 2019 by Meloni’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who leads the far-right Lega party.

The EU Parliament elections do not provide for alliances within Italy’s parties, meaning that Brothers of Italy will be in direct competition with its coalition partners Lega and Forza Italia, founded by Silvio Berlusconi.

The Lega and Forza Italia are polling at about seven percent and eight percent, respectively.

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