Populist rivals claim mandate to take power

ITALY: Two rival populist parties that emerged triumphant from the Italian general election have both laid claim to the right to form the next government, raising the spectre of political paralysis.

Matteo Salvini, head of the antimigrant League party, said yesterday that he had ‘‘the right and the duty’’ to lead a government after he took 17 per cent of the vote, making him the senior partner in his right-wing coalition with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. With a combined 37 per cent of the vote, their bloc is the largest in the new parliament.

Former prime minister Berlusconi had cast himself as senior partner and kingmaker in the coalition talks Minutes after Salvini’s victorious press conference, however, Luigi Di Maio, head of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, declared that his party, which came first with 32.6 per cent of the vote, was ‘‘the absolute winner’’ and should dictate the pace.

‘‘We feel we have the responsibility to create a government,’’ Di Maio said. ‘‘We are sure the president [of Italy] will give us this opportunity.’’

By polling over 49 per cent between them, the two anti-establishment parties have scored the biggest victory for populists in Europe since the Brexit referendum. However, a hung parliament looms because neither commands a majority in parliament.

‘‘Italy is like Christopher Columbus heading out to sea: we have no idea what is on the other side,’’ Giuseppe Orsina, deputy director of the school of government at LUISS university in Rome, said.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who was in Italy for the election, was more optimistic, describing the result as an earthquake. It was ‘‘even more stunning than I thought it was going to be’’, he said.

He told Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche that the ‘‘globalist elite’’ had dismissed populism after the defeat of Marine Le Pen in France last year, but ‘‘it’s building steam’’.

Di Maio, incredulous at times at his press conference, said Five Star had more than doubled its number of senators and MPs to about 349 by winning 11 million votes.

In Sicily, where the party’s promise to pay a €780 monthly wage to the jobless has resonated, support reached almost 50 per cent. It took entire regions in the south and also made inroads into central Italy, long a bastion of the ruling centre-left Democratic Party, which won a meagre 19 per cent of the vote. – The Times