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Your support makes all the difference.An alliance of left-of-centre parties has beaten back Matteo Salvini’s far-right alliance in a key Italian regional election.
Polls had been suggesting that Emilia-Romagna, a longstanding leftist stronghold, would fall to Mr Salvini’s League and its allies.
But the populists were kept out of power after a vast surge in turnout – despite a big increase in the share of the vote for Mr Salvini’s party.
Centre-left Democratic Party (PD) governor Stefano Bonaccini won 51.4 per cent of the vote, compared with 43.7 per cent for Lucia Borgonzoni, who is backed by Mr Salvini.
“The ruling majority comes out stronger,” said PD leader Nicola Zingaretti following the result.
He said Mr Salvini had failed in his attempt to “shove the government out”.
“Emilia-Romagna has sent a signal. Salvini knows how to talk about problems, but he doesn’t know how to sort them out and the people have responded,” Mr Zingaretti added.
Turnout hit 68 per cent in the election, up around 30 percentage points from the last comparable contest in 2014 – with the highly polarised campaign drawing voters to the polls.
A defeat for progressive forces in Emilia-Romagna would have been the jewel in the far-right’s crown: the region has long been the heartland of the Italian Communist Party and its successors.
But Mr Salvini’s alliance, which takes in other party’s from Italy’s right wing, has still won nine out of ten regional elections since March 2018 – including in former left-leaning area such as Umbria.
The League’s allies also won in Calabria on Sunday, a smaller region in the south of Italy whose population numbers around 2 million compared to Emilia-Romagna’s 4.5 million. The right’s 11 per cent swing in the latter also represents progress on the last contest.
But the defeat in the northern region, including its capital of Bologna, is the latest setback for the populists – who were locked out of national government last year.
Mr Salvini’s party had quit a coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and called for new elections, but the M5S instead went into coalition with the centre-left PD.
The M5S had a bad night, winning just 3.5 per cent of the vote in Emilia-Romagna and around 7 per cent in Calabria. The party topped the 2018 national elections but has suffered a slide in popularity in recent months, including the resignation of its leader Luigi Di Maio.
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