Meloni postpones her vote until tonight due to crowds of photographers

The far-right Giorgia Meloni, the great favorite to win the elections held this Sunday in Italy, was scheduled to vote this morning in Rome, but has finally changed the schedule until the last hour of the day due to the agglomeration of photographers and reporters waiting for her at your polling station.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
25 September 2022 Sunday 19:32
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Meloni postpones her vote until tonight due to crowds of photographers

The far-right Giorgia Meloni, the great favorite to win the elections held this Sunday in Italy, was scheduled to vote this morning in Rome, but has finally changed the schedule until the last hour of the day due to the agglomeration of photographers and reporters waiting for her at your polling station.

Meloni, 45, who was going to vote at 11:00 a.m., wants to prevent voters from being able to vote calmly due to the massive presence of the media and has decided to delay his vote after 10:00 p.m., reported the local media.

Instead, the far-right Matteo Salvini, at the head of the League, and the secretary general of the progressive Democratic Party (PD), Enrico Letta, have been the first political leaders to vote in the general elections held this Sunday in Italy.

Salvini, a member of the right-wing coalition to which the polls give a wide victory, cast his vote in Milan (north), where he will spend election day in the company of his daughter until the polls close, at 11:00 p.m. local time ( 9:00 p.m. GMT), when the exit polls will be known.

"The beautiful thing is that if the Italians choose the League and the center-right, for five years the government, the prime minister and the ministers, the parties and the alliances will not change (...) because the last few years have been complicated ", Said the leader of the League, to which the polls give around a 12% intention to vote.

Shortly after, the one who cast his vote was Letta, called to be head of the opposition according to the polls and who did so in Rome, in the popular neighborhood of Testaccio.

Before both, the head of state, Sergio Mattarella, had voted in his native Palermo (Sicily).

The Italian conservative Silvio Berlusconi voted in Milan (north) along with his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, a deputy for the party led by the tycoon, Forza Italia (FI), and which is part of the right-wing coalition favored to prevail in the elections.

The polling stations in Italy opened today at 07:00 local time for general elections that could make history if, as all the polls indicate, the far-right Giorgia Meloni wins and becomes the first woman to come to power in the country.

About 51 million Italians are summoned to the polls 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.

The main Spanish parties await the scrutiny of the Italian elections that are being held this Sunday with fears, some hope and cautious silences, aware of the possible victory of a coalition led by Georgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy.

Curiously, the confessed silences were carried out by the two great parties, the PSOE and the PP, which probably due to the possibility that they will have to govern Spain and deal with the Italian Executive in international forums, refused to make prior judgments about the elections to questions from Servimedia .

Sources from the PSOE summoned the moment in which the definitive results are known to make some assessment, while the popular ones, in the same sense, refused to "preview" and were content to testify that they are following the elections "with great interest when dealing with from a neighboring country and one of the most important economies in the euro", an aspect in which they agree with the socialists.

However, the President of the Government and leader of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, sent "strength and courage" to the leader of the Italian Democratic Party (PD), Enrico Letta, at the closing of the campaign, before today's appointment, where "Italy is call for a very important election", because, "when there are elections, the alternative is always clear: either we go forward, or we go back".

In this sense, Sánchez affirmed that "we must advance in rights and freedoms, we must advance towards a socially just response to the economic consequences of Putin's war in Ukraine". "And all this, the progress in rights and freedoms, also in a fair response to the economic crises caused by the war and the pandemic that we still have to overcome, is represented by the Democratic Party and Enrico Letta," said the Spanish president.

Outside the PSOE and the PP, one of the Vox deputies who has a greater knowledge of Italy, when consulted by this agency, stated that his party could benefit from the fact that Meloni, who participated in the campaign of this formation for the last Andalusian elections, be the next Prime Minister of Italy.

"It's always good to see that a party like this can govern," he commented, although he doesn't have much hope that Meloni will be able to consolidate herself as prime minister because she is the candidate and leader of an anti-system formation.

His prediction is that the European Commission will put pressure on the two partners of Brothers of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini's Lega, to remove her from the Government in less than a year, as it did in his day with the Berlusconi himself.

In United We Can, for its part, one of the international political leaders of the confederal group told Servimedia that the Italian elections "are an important double wake-up call for Spain." On the one hand, because "it reminds us that reactionary parties can come to power and from there put an end to fundamental rights."

On the other hand, because, symmetrically, the victory that is expected from the right "supposes a challenge to all the progressive forces: if we govern with temperance and go to the elections in fragments, defeat is assured."

In short, this deputy warns of the danger that "on Monday Italy will wake up with one of the most right-wing elected governments in Europe", but, if this were to happen, he stressed that the Spanish "must occupy the space left by Italy and be a benchmark in expanding rights and protecting the most vulnerable".

Finally, one of the members of the Ciudadanos board, also consulted by this agency, fears that Italy will enter an anti-European spiral with a government presided over by Meloni, which, moreover, would connect with a not-so-European tendency, unlike Spain.

Given this perspective, his hope is that an economy strongly dependent on exports such as Italy's would not allow an Executive led by the Brothers of Italy to put into practice the eccentricities that it expresses rhetorically. "Extremist parties, when they come to government, realize there are things they can't do," he observes.