Italy's polling stations opened today at 07:00 local time (05:00 GMT) for general elections that can make history if, as all the polls indicate, the far-right Giorgia Meloni wins and becomes the first woman to arrive to power in the country.
About 51 million Italians are summoned to the polls to exercise their right until 11:00 p.m. (9:00 p.m. GMT), the closing time of the voting centers and when the exit polls will be known.
These elections will serve to elect 600 parliamentarians (400 deputies and 200 senators), which represents a significant cut compared to the current 945 (630 and 315) adopted in a reform approved in a referendum and 2.7 million young people will have the opportunity to vote for the first time.
There is also a vote in the region of Sicily (south) for the election of its president and the renewal of its Assembly.
Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) and the coalition that also includes the far-right League, led by Matteo Salvini, and the conservative Forza Italia (FI), led by Silvio Berlusconi, are the big favorites for a victory that is expected to be overwhelming, since polls give him nearly 20 points ahead of Enrico Letta's progressive Democratic Party (PD) and his small center-left allies.
The links between Salvini and Berlusconi with Vladimir Putin's Russia, the tug-of-war of Meloni and his partners with Europe, after moderating their eurosceptic discourse, or the fear that a very large majority could change the Constitution without consensus have marked an unprecedented summer campaign that has failed to arouse the interest of Italians, with nearly 40% abstaining and undecided.
In fact, the abstentionists and undecided will play an important role in the results, which on the last day allowed by Italian law to publish polls, 15 days before the elections, were around 40%, although it seems unlikely that the right will not obtain an absolute majority.
In those polls, FdI hovered around 25% of the vote, a meteoric rise from 4% in the 2018 elections thanks to Meloni and his role as the only opposition to Mario Draghi's national unity government, leading his coalition to 45 %.
The PD is the second party, with 21.5%, and its coalition with other small progressive forces only reaches 27.2%, while Giuseppe Conte's 5 Star Movement (M5S) has 15%, which places it ahead of the League (12.3%) and FI (8%), and the "third pole", formed by the centrists Acción and Italia Viva, adds up to 6.7%.
