in Italy, the list of Giorgia Meloni, the head of government, comes first with 28% of the votes

The Fratelli d’Italia party outpaced its competitors, while Italy’s other far-right party, The League, collapsed.

She succeeded in her bet. Giorgia Meloni, the only head of government within the EU to lead a list herself for the European elections, won after the vote on Sunday June 9. Fratelli d’Italia thus obtained 28% of the votes, according to national estimates relayed by the European Parliament. The far-right party is ahead of the Democratic Party (23%), center-left, and the populists of the Five Star Movement (12%).

The first results also confirm the decline of the other Italian far-right party, The League. Matteo Salvini’s movement obtained 9% votes, far behind its ally in the government. The party, which had counted on an openly homophobic and racist head of the list for this campaign, ended up well short of its success in 2019, when it received more than 34% of the votes. The League comes neck and neck with Forza Italia. The party of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the fourth force in the vote with 9.5% of the votes.

In Italy, the campaign for the European elections gave parties the opportunity to assess their popularity with voters, particularly within the government coalition. “If you want to tell me that you still trust me, I would like you to do it by simply writing ‘Giorgia’ on the ballot paper”launched the Prime Minister, in power since the fall of 2022, at the launch of her campaign.

Like several other top candidates in her country, Giorgia Meloni does not intend to sit in the European Parliament, reports the daily La Libre Belgique. On the other hand, she hopes to succeed in “do in Europe exactly what we did in Italy on September 25, 2022: create a majority that unites the right-wing forces to ultimately send the left back into opposition”. An objective which could succeed since the current president of the European Commission and leader of the EPP, Ursula von der Leyen, does not rule out joining forces with Fratelli d’Italia to find a majority in Parliament.

The program of the Italian far-right party, which currently sits with the European Conservatives and Reformists (CRE), is nevertheless essentially based on a criticism of EU policy. “In addition to being president of Fratelli d’Italia, I am also the leader of European conservatives who want to have a decisive role in changing European politics”, Giorgia Meloni pointed out at the end of April. To do this, she calls for toughening laws on immigration and control at the EU’s external borders, but also for reversing several Green Deal measures, which she considers too restrictive for farmers.