Italians oust traditional parties

Voters back populists, far-right in anti-establishment edict

ROME — Italy’s victorious anti-establishment forces declared a new epoch of their country’s political life on Monday, hours after an election demolition of the traditional parties that dominated the nation for decades.

Both the surging populist Five Star Movement and the anti-migrant, far-right League party claimed a win after Italians left them as the most potent forces in the country. The shift makes an anti-establishment leader likely for Italy and was a powerful display of Italians’ fury with old-line politicians and with the European Union in Brussels.

Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio compared the day to other monumental moments in Italian history when the old political order was swept out the door.

“Today, for us, the third republic commences,” Di Maio said. “At last, the republic of Italian citizens.”

With 99 percent of the vote counted Monday evening, the traditional center-left and center-right parties combined had managed to beat Five Star’s 32.6 percent vote total by only a sliver of a percentage point — a collapse for them and a confirmation of the new populist power.

And well over half of Italians voted for EU-skeptic parties that have questioned Italy’s use of the euro currency and its alliance with the West against Russia. The League, whose leader Matteo Salvini last year signed an agreement with the political party founded by Russian President Vladimir Putin, claimed its own victory on Monday with 17.4 percent of the vote. They now stand astride a center-right coalition, which received 37 percent of the vote.

“I see this as a vote for the future,” Salvini told supporters on Monday. “I am and will remain a populist, one of those who listens to the people and does their duty.”

With the shattered landscape leaving no single force with a clear route to power, it remained unclear Monday whether the Five Star Movement or the League would get the first chance at trying to form a coalition.

The choice of which party gets the first chance will be made by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

The results marked a possible final chapter in the long political career of Silvio Berlusconi. The 81-year-old ex-prime minister led his center-right Forward Italy to a surprise weak result of 14 percent.

And former center-left prime minister Matteo Renzi, who resigned in December 2016 after a referendum defeat, abandoned his comeback attempt Monday after his Democratic Party won 18.7 percent of the vote — less than half of what it received in 2014 in elections for the European Parliament.

“A clear defeat,” Renzi said, adding he would quit leadership of his party.

Analysts said that even as the results were messy, the combined power of the anti-system candidates pointed to one clear victor: anger.

“There are two sides of this common root: rage and of rebellion against the political elites,” said Massimiliano Panarari, who teaches politics at Rome’s LUISS University.