The leader of Italy’s most popular left-wing party has announced he will resign after its catastrophic defeat to a coalition of right-wing parties led by Giorgia Meloni.
Enrico Letta, the head of Italy’s Democratic Party, has announced that he will resign following his party’s seismic defeat to a right-wing coalition headed up by populist firebrand Giorgia Meloni during the country’s general election on Sunday.
Made up of Fratelli D’Italia (Brothers of Italy), La Lega (the League) and Forza Italia (Forward Italy), the three-party alliance is now expected to gain an outright majority in the country’s parliament, with Meloni now looking likely to become Italy’s first woman Prime Minister.
While a very good day for the Italian right, it is another story entirely for those on the left, with Letta announcing it is now his intention to resign as a result of his party’s poor performance.
According to a report by Il Foglio, while the former Italian Prime Minister (2013-14) would not be stepping back right away, he said that he would be assembling a party conference for the purposes of holding a leadership election.
“In the coming days we will bring together the party organs to accelerate the path that will lead us to the congress. A congress to which I will not reappear as a candidate,” the centrist publication reports Letta as saying.
However, the politician appeared to refuse to take responsibility for the rise of the right-wing in the country, saying that it was the populist left-wing 5 Star party’s Giuseppe Conte who brought down the former technicolour government led by Eurocrat Mario Draghi.
“The Italians chose the right, it was a clear choice,” he said. “The trend that emerged two weeks ago in Sweden is also confirmed in Italy. It is a sad day for Italy and for Europe.”
The Italian Democratic Party is not the only group having a very bad day in Italy however.
Another loser on Monday was Emma Bonino, a former EU Commissioner, who currently heads up the party Europa+, a militantly pro-Brussels party that outright states it aims to create a so-called “United States of Europe“.
Such an aim has seemingly been stoutly rejected by the Italian public however, with Bonino losing her Senate seat in Rome to a member of Fratelli D’Italia, headed up by likely future Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The party as a whole meanwhile may not even manage to get the 3 per cent of the total vote required to gain any seats through the country’s Proportional Representation system, which exists alongside first-past-the-post races.
Another loser revealed on Monday was Italy’s Movimento 5 Stelle (5-Star-Movement), which formerly existed as the single biggest party in the Italian government before collapsing into infighting while in power.
The Italian public has now punished the party for its time in office at the polls, with the party falling from nearly 33 per cent of the national vote last election to around 15-16 per cent on Sunday based on estimates.
It will likely reduce the party to third place, putting it behind its former coalition partners in the Democratic Party, as well as Fratelli D’Italia, which is set to be the most popular group.
Despite such a failure, the party’s leader, Giuseppe Conte, seems pleased with the result, saying that his group will now have a “big responsibility” in the opposition benches.
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