Giorgia Meloni gets personal as Italy votes in EU poll
On Saturday afternoon, Italians will commence voting in the third of four days of European elections spanning 27 countries, determining the next EU Parliament’s members.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni anticipates that the outcome will bolster her influence in Italian politics. She has even encouraged voters to simply inscribe “Giorgia” on their ballots.
While most EU nations are slated to vote on Sunday, recent weeks have been marked by turmoil, with two European leaders and several other politicians enduring physical assaults.
Friday evening witnessed an assault on Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, in Copenhagen, just two days before the Danish elections.
This latest attack has elicited widespread shock among European leaders amidst elections involving an estimated 373 million European voters.
In a similar vein, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico narrowly survived an assassination attempt last month and has only recently been discharged from the hospital. Additionally, numerous German political figures have been targeted.
Despite the elections’ intended detachment from national politics, the reality, particularly in Italy, paints a different picture.
Leading the far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI), Ms. Meloni, who assumed office as prime minister in 2022, has taken the unconventional step of placing her name atop her party’s ballot, despite having no plans to occupy a seat in the European Parliament.
Since her ascent to prime minister in 2022, Giorgia Meloni has maintained consistent poll ratings, buoyed by a fragmented centrist and left-wing opposition, as well as the gradual decline of her junior coalition partner, Matteo Salvini’s once-dominant populist League party, whose supporters are increasingly drawn to the allure of FdI.
To reverse this trend, Mr. Salvini has been steering his party’s rhetoric further rightward.
Although the League’s electoral posters, decrying various EU-endorsed initiatives, have drawn some ridicule, they have also garnered significant attention.
Similarly, the League’s lead candidate, Roberto Vannacci, has stirred controversy. Discharged from military service due to the self-publication of a book expressing homophobic and racist sentiments, Vannacci has only amplified these views since assuming candidacy for the League.
Hardly a day goes by when Roberto Vannacci’s messages are not amplified by the media. That could translate into votes for the League, but if it doesn’t then trouble might be in store for Mr Salvini, whose leadership is beginning to be questioned.
The same scrutiny will be applied to the results of the left-wing Democratic Party (PD), whose leader Elly Schlein will hope to match the 19% of the vote it won in the 2019 elections if she is to stay in her post.
Further to the left, all eyes will be on Ilaria Salis – a self-described antifascist activist who has been detained in Hungary since 2023 on charges of participating in the beating of three far-right militants and being part of a criminal association. She is now running on the Left/Greens platform.
Italians will be able to cast their votes until late on Sunday evening when elsewhere in Europe the elections have already wrapped up.
The Netherlands voted on Thursday, and a Dutch exit poll suggested a tight race between a left-green alliance, narrowly ahead of anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party. An estimated turnout of 47% was the highest since 1989, rebutting any suggestion that voters had tired of politics.
Irish and Czech voters went to the polls on Friday.
Slovakia, Latvia, and Malta also vote on Saturday, while Czechs vote for a second day.
Several Czech parties from different political groups in the European Parliament have formed a joint candidate list as a “cordon sanitaire” to counter populists from the ANO party of former Prime Minister Andrej Babis.
Germany is among the EU countries voting on Sunday, and the latest polls indicate that the center-right CDU/CSU may leapfrog Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party.
His party is fighting for second place with coalition partners the Greens and far-right opposition party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The AfD has been involved in a series of recent scandals over foreign interference, espionage, and accusations of Nazism.
In France, which has the second largest number of MEPs in the parliament after Germany, President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party is also vying for second place with a resurgent Socialist party under top candidate Raphaël Glucksmann.
Both parties are trailing Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), which is consistently polling above 30%.
Calling for a high turnout in a TV interview on the penultimate day of the campaign, Mr Macron warned that “Europe has never been so threatened” by the surge of the right.
Other leaders have adopted a similarly urgent tone before the EU vote.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who is recovering from surgery at home after last month’s assassination attempt, returned to the political scene this week with a well-timed attack on Slovakia’s liberal opposition, the “anti-government media” and foreign-funded NGOs which he said had created a climate of hatred and intolerance that made the shooting possible.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban – who has been the most vocal opponent of EU support for Ukraine – warned that Europe was reaching a point of no return in terms of preventing conflict from spilling beyond the borders of Ukraine, and hit out at what he called the EU’s “war psychosis”.
Polls in Italy will be the last to close at 23:00 (21:00 GMT) on Sunday.
A projection, combining the first provisional results from some EU member states with estimates for the rest, will come out soon after.
