Upstart gets the Five Star treatment as Italy heads to polls

5-Star Movement candidate premier Luigi Di Maio. Photo / AP

Filling a customer's plastic bag with glistening white strips of fresh calamari, Enrico Ursini has no doubt who he will vote for in Italy's general election today.

"I'm with Di Maio all the way," the fishmonger says, referring to Luigi Di Maio, the 31-year-old leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. "They're the new generation. If they win, we'll send Luigi a nice big box of seafood."

Ursini runs a stall in an open-air market in Pomigliano d'Arco, the town near Naples where Di Maio grew up. Surrounded by abandoned factories and scrappy farmland and overlooked by the crater of Vesuvius, it is a stronghold of the Five Star Movement - and not just because of pride in a local boy made good who now has a shot at becoming Italy's youngest-ever prime minister.

Towns and cities across the whole of the south are expected to swing towards Five Star. The party's promises of a guaranteed minimum wage, minimum pensions of €780 a month and €17 billion to help families in need have struck a chord where youth unemployment can reach 50 per cent.

Five Star has said that, if elected, it would seek concessions from the EU, including a relaxing of spending rules and more control of interest rates. If they were not forthcoming, it would hold a referendum on Italy ditching the euro as its currency.

Southern Italy has emerged as the key battleground in the election, as Five Star, which is expected to win around 28 per cent of the vote, slugs it out with a centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, which polls suggest will attract around 35 per cent of the vote.

Italy may be inching its way out of economic doldrums, but people in Pomigliano are yet to see the effects. A Fiat factory on the outskirts of town that used to employ 15,000 people now has work for just 3500.

"You know how much I've taken in sales all morning? Forty euros. It's ridiculous," said Angelo Irvolino, 60, who runs a stall selling women's clothing. "We need a government that takes less in taxes and leaves more money in people's pockets."

At the adjacent stall Santolo Nunziata, 52, says: "Whoever wins, they need to help small businesses, otherwise for us it's finished. I pay my taxes but I'm suffering like a dog."