ROME (Reuters) -Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing allies have kept control of the central region of Abruzzo, election results on Monday showed, bouncing back from a shock defeat in Sardinia two weeks ago.
With all ballots counted from Sunday’s regional election, Abruzzo’s right-wing governor Marco Marsilio secured 53.5% of the vote, while the candidate supported by all major opposition parties took 46.5%.
The vote shaped up as an important test for the ruling coalition after its candidate narrowly lost in Sardinia, and will probably give Meloni a boost ahead of European Parliament elections in June in which the right is expected to do well.
“It is a source of great pride for us that the citizens of Abruzzo have decided to trust him (Marsilio), and to trust the centre-right, which has confirmed its predominance,” Meloni wrote on Facebook.
The result cemented the position of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party as the leading force in Italian politics. Her party won some 24% of the vote in the mountainous Abruzzo, well ahead of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) at 20.4%.
Meloni’s allies welcomed the result with mixed feelings. The centre-right Forza Italia performed more strongly than expected, winning more than 13%, while Matteo Salvini’s hard-right League took just 7.6%, underlining its recent decline.
“‘Forza Italia is a reliable force … crucial for the victory of the centre-right,” said party leader and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who took the reins of Forza Italia last year after the death of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The result dealt a blow to the centre-left bloc, which had laid aside its many internal rivalries to campaign together, hoping for a repeat of its recent success in Sardinia where it ousted the centre-right from power.
Giuseppe Conte, leader of the left-leaning 5-Star Movement that was in an alliance in Abruzzo with the PD, said his party had achieved a “modest” result with just 7% of the vote.
“(This) pushes us to work even harder on our project … to convince the many citizens who no longer vote to get involved and participate,” he wrote on X.
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer and Angelo Amante; editing by Giulia Segreti and Mark Heinrich)
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