Italy's far-right League leads in EU vote: exit polls

Pulse News Agency International by AFP

May 26, 2019 11:03 PM

Matteo Salvini's anti-migrant League party won the most votes in Sunday's European elections in Italy with 27-31 percent, marking a historic success for the far-right, exit polls showed.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini arrives to cast his ballot at a polling station in Milan with exit polls later showing his far-right party on top in EU elections

The result will strengthen Interior Minister Salvini's grip on government, after coalition partner the Five Star Movement (M5S) was beaten by a resurgent centre-left Democratic Party (PD) which came second with 21-25 percent.

Salvini tweeted a photo of himself grinning and holding a sign saying "top party in Italy" while standing in front of a bookshelf featuring, among other things, a religious icon and a Make America Great Again baseball cap.

Luigi Di Maio's anti-establishment M5S garnered between 18.5-22.5 percent of votes, while tycoon and former premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia scored eight-12 percent.

"The League has probably become the top party in Italy," the head of the party's Senate grouping Riccardo Molinari said after the exit polls were released.

The result for the League was not as high as some had predicted but confirmed the party's stellar rise since forming a government in June last year.

The party won just six percent of votes in the last European elections in 2014.

Snap elections?

Some analysts predicted that Salvini would want to call snap elections if the League obtained a high score, although he denied this during campaigning.

"As far as I'm concerned, if the League wins nothing changes in Italy, everything will change in Europe, starting from tomorrow," he said earlier Sunday.

The March 2018 general election in the eurozone's third largest economy saw the League take home just 17 percent of the vote, while the M5S -- which set itself up as the honest, environmentally-friendly alternative to a corrupt old political guard -- pocketed over 32 percent.

Analysts said a strong League result -- over 30 percent -- could see Salvini tempted to ditch the M5S for the far-right Brothers of Italy (which won five-seven percent on Sunday), or a fresh alliance with the party's historic partner, the centre-right Forza Italia.

"We don't intend to use this result to put the government in crisis," the League's Molinari said, claiming that with M5S the governing coalition had more than 50 percent of votes.

"Our result gives us more strength to put our themes to the fore," he said.

Bersluconi, 82, has repeatedly called on Salvini to dump his partner M5S and try to form a government with Forza Italia.

Salvini has presented himself as the leader of far-right "sovereignists" in Europe, and last weekend held a rally in Milan in his northern Italian heartland to bring 12 populist parties together, including France's Marie Le Pen and her National Rally (RN).

Despite their shared dislike of immigration, multiculturalism, the left and the EU, Europe's populists remain divided on many other key issues, including budgetary discipline, migrant distribution and relations with Moscow.

The leader of what used to be the separatist Northern League had campaigned hard around the country for the European elections, prompting opponents to accuse him of neglecting his ministerial duties.

Pulse News Agency International by AFP