Italians vote in election marked by populist energy, anger towards migrants

A woman gets out of a voting booth at a polling station in Fiuggi, Italy. Photo / AP

Italians headed to the polls overnight NZT in a widely watched vote that will offer a measure of the power of the anti-establishment populists who have been campaigning against traditional parties across Europe.

After a campaign riven by angry attitudes toward migrants and pessimism about Italy's economic prospects, voters will have a chance to register their discontent at the ballot box.

Ahead of the vote, the country's political landscape was fragmented by the rise of parties that exist outside the left-right spectrum that has dominated politics in European countries since World War II. Many leaders and analysts question whether there will be enough support for any one force to put together a governing coalition.

Italian politics are famously chaotic, and prime ministers have rarely stayed in office for their full five-year mandates. But this year is notable for a feeling of a breakdown of the old system and a sense that what is happening here could be the future for other countries around Europe.

Combined, the old-line centre-left and centre-right parties are capturing less than 40 per cent of voters, according to opinion polls, with the rest of voters undecided or preferring other parties.

"I've lost all trust in the Italian political class that keeps promising and promising and promising," said Lorena Bernardini, 42, a shop owner who was voting in the ethnically mixed Esquilino neighbourhood of Rome. She said she voted for the Five Star Movement because "maybe they're not as enmeshed in the system."

The Italian vote came the same day that Germany's centre-left Social Democratic Party approved a deal for a grand coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right Christian Democrats, clearing the way for a government after five months of political paralysis. There, the difficulties were also fuelled by the rise of outside-the-mainstream parties, including the far-right Alternative for Germany group.

Italy, where the right is rising and the center imploding. “We’re a laboratory that the world should pay attention to see the avant-garde of what will happen in other democracies.” @robertosaviano told me. https://t.co/gEeThbM23P

— Rachel Donadio (@RachelDonadio) March 3, 2018

In Italy, one uniting factor has been a fury directed at the more than 600,000 people who have arrived on Italy's shores in the last five years. Ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is leading the right-wing bloc that stands the best chance of winning the vote, has advocated deporting them all - a step without precedent in postwar Western Europe. Yet he is still seen as a moderate by Italians and European leaders, given the even angrier rhetoric on his right flank.

His centre-right Forward Italy party was expected to narrowly beat out one of its right-wing coalition partners, the Northern League, which has expanded its appeal beyond its regional roots on a nationalist platform of protections for Italians and harsh rhetoric toward Muslims and newcomers. But there remained an outside chance that the polls could be underestimating the support for the far-right party, and that its youthful leader, Matteo Salvini, could actually prevail atop the coalition.

The largest single vote-getter was expected to be the populist Five Star Movement, which has about a 28 per cent share of the opinion polls. But they have struggled to convince voters they are ready to govern, and it is unclear whether they are willing to make the compromises necessary to form a ruling coalition. Their hard-to-categorise policies are determined by an unusual system of direct online voting among their party members, and they have not taken clear stances on some of main issues facing Italy in the world, such as European Union integration and the future of economic sanctions against Russia.

The polls close at 11am NZT, and preliminary results will be available several hours later. But with such fragmentation, negotiations over a coalition are likely to take weeks or even months.