Italy at the polls. Four lessons to learn from the 2022 general election

ABSTRACT

On 25 September 2022, in an election that saw a record low turnout, the coalition of the centre-right emerged as the clear winner and Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) as the most-voted party. As a result, the centre-right political forces agreed to form a government headed by FdI’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, who became the first female Prime Minister in Italy’s history. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the election outcome and of its implications for the transformation of the Italian party system. The main ‘lessons’ of the results have to do with voters increasingly dissatisfied with parties and prone to abstaining or to changing their vote choice, and with a party system that has become more polarized and de-institutionalized.

KEYWORDS:

• 2022 election
• FDI
• Meloni
• dissatisfactiona
• polarization
• deinstitutionalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See below in the section on individual-level voting shifts.

2. See the section on party system deinstitutionalization.

3. The 2022 ICCP Italy CAWI survey was designed by CISE (the Italian Centre for Electoral Studies) and administered by Demetra.

4. Signs of increasing policy polarization (Conti, Pedrazzani, and Russo 2020), and of parties’ and voters’ ideological polarization (Russo and Valbruzzi 2022) had also been detected before the 2022 general election. See also Bosco and Verney (2022).

5. On the concept of party system deinstitutionalization and its empirical application (and implications) in Western European countries see Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2022).

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Notes on contributors

Alessandro Chiaramonte

Alessandro Chiaramonte is Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence, where he currently teaches Italian Politics and Elections, Parties and Public Opinion. He has published books and articles on elections, electoral systems and party systems. More specifically, his research interests have focused on the functioning and the effects of electoral systems, on the comparative change of parties and party systems, and on the long-lasting transformation of the Italian party and political system, analysed from both a national and a regional perspective.