Renzi drops two million votes but is still a winner

Despite dropping more than two million votes, the Democratic Party (PD) of Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi scored another significant success on Sunday, winning the presidency in five out of seven regional elections in Campania, Liguria, Marche, Puglia, Tuscany, Umbria and Veneto.

On this same weekend last year, just four months after he took office, Mr Renzi returned a monumental 40.8 per cent vote in European elections, copperfastening his position in power. The PD vote is also 33.8 per cent down on that returned in the 2013 general election.

After a year when his reform programme has prompted tensions with teachers, trade unions and pensioners, and when his autocratic style of government has annoyed many, a 50.2 per cent drop in vote is hardly surprising.

Mr Renzi was typically unworried by this latest result. “This result is very positive and now we will press ahead with even greater determination with our programme of renewal of the party and of change in the country . . . Don’t anyone think for a second that this vote can bring down the government. I’m not leaving government house and I will stay there until 2018,” Mr Renzi told reporters on his return from Herat in Afghanistan, where he had paid a fleeting visit to 700 Italian troops, part of NATO’s combat mission.

Biggest party

Sunday’s results indicate that the PDs are still the biggest party in the land on 25 per cent, followed by the protest M5S movement on 15.5 per cent, the Northern League on 12.9 per cent and Forza Italia on 11.2 per cent. Forza Italia won the Liguria region thanks to a classic leftist split within the PD.

When the party meets next week, Mr Renzi is likely to point an accusatory finger at internal dissidents.

For Forza Italia, however, that Liguria victory, in the person of Berlusconi adviser Giovanni Toti, was the only good news. The party’s ongoing decline was confirmed by a vote that showed a loss of just under two million votes, or 67 per cent, since the 2013 general election.

The Forza Italia decline, too, is in stark contrast to the significant success registered by its erstwhile electoral partners, the federalist Northern League. Of the major political parties, the Northern League is the only one to have consistently increased its vote over the last two years, winning 403,000 more votes for a 109.4 per cent increase.

Final reflection concerns the Beppe Grillo-led M5S protest movement, who again defied critics with a 15.5 per cent vote, which confirms their position as the second largest party in the land.