OK, something I have been wondering about - can anyone explain what the... purpose of the minor parties in the Centre-Left coalition are? like, who are pro-europa and why are they standing?
Italian politics is a wasteland of splinter groups and micro-parties, and it is felt in the major parties that some of these groups have enough quality people in them to be worth allying with.
For instance, Piu Europa are made up of tiny splinter parties led by Benedetto della Vedova (elected last time in alliance with Forza Italia but now a junior minister for the PD government), Emma Bonino (formerly a presidential candidate and Foreign Secretary), Bruno Tabacci (a former Christian Democrat who has been around forever) and another group who are basically pointless but have three deputies. Piu Europa therefore has enough decent people and enough of a distinct brand to appeal to liberals who might not otherwise vote for PD, and the coalition will therefore benefit electorally.
The reason why micro-parties have so many decent people is because the party system in Italy is constantly changing (for instance, Insieme includes the Greens, who used to be quite a major centre-left ally but subsequently collapsed, but there are still a lot of former Green deputies involved with the party and some of them aren't awful) and was obviously completely reshaped in 1994. Della Vedova and Bonino were prominent figures in the Italian Radical Party, which was relatively important in the 1970s and 80s, but made some stupid decisions and now the former Radicals are spread far and wide in different clientelist micro-parties and factions within major parties.
The clientelism is also key, of course.
