Italy’s ruling parties will not form joint EU elections list

Italy’s ruling right-wing political parties – Fratelli d’Italia (ECR), Forza Italia (EPP), Lega (ID) – will not present a joint list of candidates for the 2024 European elections, even though this may have helped tip the balance in their favour.

“There is no chance that this pattern will be replicated in Italy. With Lega and Forza Italia, we have a strong and stable government alliance, but at the European elections, everyone will present themselves with their list”, MEP Carlo Fidanza, head of the delegation of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party in the European Parliament, told Euractiv.

“The plurality of political offerings has always been an asset of the Italian centre-right. The choice of our ODS partners and EPP-area parties responds to a national logic”, he added, commenting on the choice made in the Czech Republic, where Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS/ECR) on Friday announced the understanding found with the EPP government allies.

As previously reported by Euractiv, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia aspires to build “common paths” with the right-wing parties in Europe to obtain a majority in Brussels that veers to the right but without the groups uniting. According to Fidanza, they must remain distinct “with their identities and specificities of which they are jealous guardians”.

But an alliance between the ECR and the EPP – to which Fratelli d’Italia and Forza Italia respectively belong – would not be enough to form a majority, despite growing support, even with the contribution of ID, to which Lega belongs.

To even aspire to cooperation with the EPP group, according to an EPP official, parties need to be pro-European, pro-legal state and pro-Ukraine – conditions that were recently met by Fratelli d’Italia but only partially by Lega, which still holds Eurosceptic positions.

However, one ECR party that does not meet these conditions is the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has been accused of influencing the functioning of the judiciary and media freedom in Poland. But PiS’s defeat in the last national elections has no direct consequences for the ECR group, which Meloni chairs, Fidanza added.

“PiS remains an important pillar of our political family with which we share the goal of building an even wider conservative area starting with the next European elections”, Fidanza told Euractiv.

“No Polish government has ever won a third term, and after eight years of uninterrupted government, it is normal to pay for a bit of electorate fatigue, especially in such difficult years for everyone and Poland. We will see if Tusk can form a solid governing coalition: it is one thing to unite in demonising the opponent, quite another to govern with such different positions”, he added.

(Federica Pascale | Euractiv.it)