POLITICA
ITALY’S POLITICAL BRIEF
PREDICTIONS:
Italy has 73 seats in 751-member parliament:
Predictions of Top 5 Parties in Italy’s European Elections:
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EU ELECTIONS: alliances form across Europe
Earlier this month, during a meeting with Matteo Salvini, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán called for the European People’s Party (EPP) to form an alliance with Salvini’s newly formed nationalist-populist bloc, the European Alliance of People and Nations (EAPN, previously ENF). The EPP, the EU’s dominant centre-right bloc in the European Parliament, has had a long-standing informal coalition with the centre-left Socialist and Democrats (S&D)– the second largest bloc. However, with rising nationalism and the threat of terrorism in Europe, Salvini has admitted he would struggle to cooperate with pro-migration parties on the left. Additionally, the outspoken Silvio Berlusconi has added to this call, appealing to Europe’s conservatives and nationalists to unite to ‘transform Europe into a Europe for growth”. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, part of the Christian democratic EPP, is on track to win 7 of Italy’s 73 seats in the European parliament, six less than the previous year. The Salvini-Orbán relationship has become even cosier in the last few months, having agreed to back one another in the EU parliament and unite in their hard-line anti-migration stance. However, polls suggest that even with this alliance in Salvini’s new larger bloc, strengthened by the likes of Marie Le Pen's National Rally, Austria's Freedom Party, the Alternative for Germany, it would still not reach a majority in the European Parliament. Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead election candidate predicted to head the European Commission, has also ruled out such an alliance, assuring fierce resistance from other centrist members like Weber who want to remove the extreme right from its ranks. Nonetheless, it still indicates a blow to the mainstream forces that usually dominate in Brussels.
Salvini’s new far-right alliance in the European Parliament
(S&D)