Italy’s centre right draws hope from elections in Sicily

Italy’s parliamentary elections, which seem likely to be held in March, will be the last episode in a 12-month cycle of European votes that have included the Netherlands, Bulgaria, France, the UK, Norway, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.

Four aspects of these elections stand out. First, with the notable exception of France, the winners were chiefly on the right of the political spectrum. Second, the conventional left was in many countries not just defeated but routed.

Third, far-right and rightwing populist parties failed — except for Austria, where the Freedom party is in talks to enter the government — to grab a slice of power at national level. Lastly, it has taken or is still taking a long time in many countries to form stable coalition governments.

To judge from recent opinion polls, and from last weekend’s regional elections on the island of Sicily, Italy is broadly on course to confirm these European trends. But the fragmentation of Italy’s political conditions suggests that the nation’s 2018 elections may produce the most perplexing result of all.

Consider the Sicilian result. Sicily, for sure, is no model for the whole of Italy. In 2001, the billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi and his centre-right Forza Italia party swept all 61 Sicilian seats in Italy’s lower house of parliament. Although Mr Berlusconi was then at the height of his political allure, it was an astonishing feat that caused much speculation about the possible role of Cosa Nostra, the island’s mafia.

This time, the Sicilian election was won by a rightwing three-party coalition that included Forza Italia; the Northern League, which is these days considerably more than a northern Italian regionalist party; and Brothers of Italy, a hard-right party born partly out of Italy’s post-1945 neo-fascist tradition.

The big loser was Italy’s centre-left Democratic party (PD), which has governed Italy since 2013, and in particular Matteo Renzi, the PD leader and former prime minister. Since he lost a referendum last year on constitutional reform and resigned the premiership, Mr Renzi’s political star has fallen so far that even some PD colleagues regard him as a liability more than an asset.

The PD lost Sicily’s election in part because it proved unable to put together a broad coalition of the left to outmuscle Mr Berlusconi and his rightwing allies. Unless the PD rectifies this in the forthcoming Italian vote, the left seems doomed to defeat at the right’s hands.

The right has other reasons to be optimistic. Italy’s legislature has just passed a new election law: proportional representation will determine the allocation of 64 per cent of seats, and a first-past-the-post method will determine the other 36 per cent.

The new system will favour parties that form electoral alliances, and parties strong enough at grassroots level to win local constituencies. It seems certain to work against the Five Star Movement, Italy’s main anti-establishment party, which is unlikely to join any electoral pacts and which lacks organisational strength at local level.

There is, however, a twist. Even a successful rightwing alliance will not win an outright majority next year according to the polls. To form a government, it would need coalition partners from the left. The Democratic party may therefore return to office, though serving under a rightwing premier. As so often in Italy, the question would then be: for how long could such a coalition last?