Rightwing bloc on course for Italian election win

A rightwing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is on course for a decisive victory in Italy’s snap election, having trounced a range of rivals that failed to forge a unified front to compete more effectively against the bloc, exit polls showed.

Meloni’s coalition — with Matteo Salvini’s nationalist League and media tycoon and former premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia — is believed to have secured between 42 and 49 per cent of the total vote, enough to take a comfortable parliamentary majority.

However, the rightwing coalition appears to have fallen short of the two-thirds of seats it would need to the press ahead with its plans to amend Italy’s constitution, the polls indicated.

Under Italy’s complicated election system, a third of parliamentary seats are awarded in first-past-the-post races, which gave a significant advantage to the centre-right parties that united behind a single candidate in each of those areas, while their opponents squabbled among themselves.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, which is an heir to the neo-fascist movement, will be the largest party in the new parliament, with roughly a quarter of the votes. It looks likely to have taken a greater percentage than the League and Forza Italia combined, the exit polls showed.

The results mark a triumph for Meloni, given that the Brothers of Italy secured just 4 per cent of the vote in the last general election in 2018, though…