Italian Elections and Politics 2022 - Our Time to Schlein

[Mike88]

Latest prediction:

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1221565991299186688

The gap between Sinistra and "Destra", let's put it just like that, seems to be growing.

[Oryxslayer]

"Centro"destra? That's kind of a joke at this point, no?

The term is used often when calculating local Italian parties/results. It's used not because people are center-left/right, but more that the various candidates who align with the factions, goals, and political clans of the local teams can go from center to the extremes of the extremes. It's therefore a catch-all term to imply "from the center, to the Right/Left".

[Antonio the Sixth]

SWG projects 51% Bonaccini, 43% Borgonzoni, 4% Benini (lol)

If true, that's a solid result for the left given the circumstances.

[Former President tack50]

Looking at the evolution of Emilia Romagna, it seems most M5S voters just voted for the right?

Obviously more complicated than that I assume? Who did M5S voters vote for before 2013? The left or Berlusconi?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Who did M5S voters vote for before 2013? The left or Berlusconi?

Yes.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bonaccini takes the lead of the actual vote count, with about 10% of precincts counted.

Who did M5S voters vote for before 2013? The left or Berlusconi?

Yes.

Yeah, the original M5S electorate was a really weird eclectic mix, coming from all sides of the political spectrum and united mostly by their contempt for the establishment. On the other hand, the remaining M5S vote after Lega cannibalized its electorate is probably left-leaning, and their defection from M5S is probably what allowed Bonaccini to win.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Borgonzoni conceded, and the ER results are fast trending toward a solid win for Bonaccini, with an 8- or 9-point margin. This is actually starting to look like a bad night for Salvini. He could easily have spun a close loss as a moral victory, given that we're talking of the second most left-wing region in the country, but now that it's not even close, he clearly lost the expectations game.

[Bidenworth2020]

Is this an area that was trending right? If so, good result for Bonaccini.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Is this an area that was trending right? If so, good result for Bonaccini.

Trends are hard to gauge in a multipolar system like Italy, but right-leaning parties won more votes than left-leaning ones in the EU elections last time. What happened though is less than the right lost ground and more that the left gained votes from M5S.

[Bidenworth2020]

Is this an area that was trending right? If so, good result for Bonaccini.

Trends are hard to gauge in a multipolar system like Italy, but right-leaning parties won more votes than left-leaning ones in the EU elections last time. What happened though is less than the right lost ground and more that the left gained votes from M5S.

Interesting. I would have thought their collapse would mostly benefit the right, given the trends happening around the world.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Almost all the votes are counted, only a few scattered precincts left.

Direct vote:
Bonaccini (Left) 51.4%
Borgonzoni (Right) 43.7%
Benini (M5S) 3.5%

List vote (counting those that got more than 2%):
PD 34.7%
Lega 31.9%
FdI 8.6%
Left-aligned indy list 5.8%
M5S 4.7%
Left-aligned indy list 3.8%
FI 2.6% (lol)

[CumbrianLefty]

Quite a few pundits had their now familiar spiels prepared in the event of a right wing win.

Nice to see them inconvenienced for once

[Cassius]

Quite a few pundits had their now familiar spiels prepared in the event of a right wing win.

Nice to see them inconvenienced for once

Don’t really see how this can be spun as a setback for the right (even if elements of the mainstream media are trying very hard) - the Democrats lost one of the two regions that voted, whilst in the other (one in the heart of the cintura rossa that has been run by the left and centre-left for all but three of the last fifty years) they won by a modest margin after leading in almost every poll throughout the campaign, whilst the right’s vote went up considerably.

Once again, I feel, certain elements within the media have chosen to adopt a fairly unrealistic yardstick to measure the success of the hard right and then, once they fail to meet that yardstick, dressed it up as some great victory for the ‘centre’. We seem to have this in every European election now, where the result is either presented as ‘the centre has held’ or a ‘wake up call for the parties of the centre’, regardless of the particular context of the election. LN+FdI winning 40% of the vote in a red belt region augurs very well for their chances in any future election, whilst the Democrats winning despite scoring an anaemic vote share, by their standards, does not. I suppose we just have to wait until the right wins another regional election and then we’ll be back to ‘ITALY ON THE BRINK’, ‘BOND MARKETS ROCKED’, ‘TURNING AND TURNING IN A WIDENING GYRE’ again.

[CumbrianLefty]

But didn't polls also indicate the right could win ER?

If so, then it wasn't just the pundits (for whom I share your disdain)

[Cassius]

I mean, the polls were close but as far as i’m aware the centre-left was almost always in the lead, so a centre-left victory was hardly an unlikely scenario. Nonetheless, I read about this result on Bloomberg earlier today and they actually (in a non-opinion piece) described it as a ‘humiliation’ for Salvini, which just seems frankly bizarre in the context of the polls and the region’s history as a left wing stronghold.

It was a humiliation for M5S though, so I don’t particularly see how it bodes well for the future of the current Conte government (as parts of the media are now trumpeting). I suppose, on the one hand, if they leave government they risk getting wiped out in an early election, but on the other if they continue to stay in there they risk further erosion of their support and possibly being reduced to an adjunct of the centre-left coalition, which probably won’t be particularly helpful to them either.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Once again, I feel, certain elements within the media have chosen to adopt a fairly unrealistic yardstick to measure the success of the hard right

The thing is, that's the yardstick Salvini chose for himself. He deliberately hyped up this election as the people getting ready to send this government packing, and basically took over the Lega campaign (completely sidelining poor Borgonzoni, who at this point probably regrets it). He exuded confidence about winning it (probably based on the right's real track record of outperforming polls). When you set the expectations so high for yourself, you can't complain that what would otherwise have been a decent result is spun into a setback.

I assure you though, no one in Italy is saying that Salvini is done or anything like that.

[CumbrianLefty]

Salvini still dominates Italian politics for sure, but this is one of a few missteps recently.  Should they become a wider trend, then even given the general dreadfulness of the Italian left bets could be off.

[Antonio the Sixth]

One thing that's true and should be noted is that Bonaccini seems to have benefited from a significant personal vote. The lists that supported him only got about 48% of the vote, but he got almost 52%. Some of it is tactical voting by M5Sers (the M5S candidate got 1.5 points less than the M5S list) but many right-wingers also seem to have crossed over to support him. He has a solid record as ER President, with the region having one of the highest growth and lowest unemployment of the country. So in the end local factors probably mattered just as much as the anti-Salvini mobilization. It's kind of a John Bel Edwards situation where a party tried to nationalize the race to beat a popular incumbent and failed.

[rob in cal]

  The expectations game reminds me of when the Republicans kept narrowly winning all those special elections for congressional seats in 2017 (Georgia, Montana, Kansas etc) but in each case by numbers that implied that they were in big trouble nationally. Looks pretty similar here.

[palandio]

One thing that's true and should be noted is that Bonaccini seems to have benefited from a significant personal vote. The lists that supported him only got about 48% of the vote, but he got almost 52%. Some of it is tactical voting by M5Sers (the M5S candidate got 1.5 points less than the M5S list) but many right-wingers also seem to have crossed over to support him. He has a solid record as ER President, with the region having one of the highest growth and lowest unemployment of the country. So in the end local factors probably mattered just as much as the anti-Salvini mobilization. It's kind of a John Bel Edwards situation where a party tried to nationalize the race to beat a popular incumbent and failed.

I don't completely agree because I think that you missed an important detail: The total number of governor votes was much higher than the total number of list votes.

Total votes (lists): 2.162.216
Total votes (governor): 2.325.497 (+163.281)

Total votes (left-wing lists): 1.040.482
Total votes (Bonaccini): 1.195.742 (+155.260)

Total votes (right-wing lists): 981.787
Total votes (Borgonzini): 1.014.672 (+32.885)

Total votes (M5S list): 102.595
Total votes (Benini): 80.823 (-21.772)

You can see that the number of governor votes was significantly higher than the number of list votes, a phenomenon that is widely seen in Italian regional and local elections and often forgotten. Borgonzoni actually got 33k votes more than her supporting lists. Bonaccini on the other hand got 155k more. I think that many of these 155k voters are not convinced left-wingers, but voted against the right (and thought that Bonaccini was an ok guy). I doubt that many of them would vote for a right-wing list. On the other hand mobilization for Borgonzoni and the right was much more via the national Lega brand. If you are a Lega supporter and want to through out the left it does not make sense to vote for Bonaccini.
Hence I do not think that there was any significant right-wing-Bonaccini crossover vote

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, I'm aware that many people only vote for the presidency ballot and not for the lists. And sure, a significant part of it is low-propensity left-leaning voters bothering to cross out Bonaccini's name but not a list logo, but I don't think it's crazy to suggest that a few of them are people who are nationally right-wing but thought Bonaccini was the better candidate locally. It makes perfect sense given everything else we know about how this campaign went down (Borgonzoni being such a weak candidate that Salvini basically locked her away to run her campaign himself). If we want to measure the "real" national political mood in Emilia, the truth is probably somewhere in between the list and personal vote.


Anyway, here's some hard data to draw your own conclusion from. Election results of the 2018 parliamentary, 2019 European, and 2020 regional elections in both regions (president and list for ER; in Calabria there's only one vote). I included LeU on the "left" side but not the more extreme far-left lists.



Left-right swing from the 2018 elections:
- ER (president) +5.6
- ER (list) +0.5
- Calabria -12.9

Left-right swing from the 2019 elections:
- ER (president) +12.5
- ER (list) +7.4
- Calabria -2.8

The Calabria results are scary, but they can probably be safely dismissed given the low turnout and the peculiarity of local issues. Calabria has kicked out every incumbent government since the Second Republic and seems to largely just be disaffected from politics in general (see also M5S's results in 2018). The ER numbers are more meaningful, although again the question is which numbers do you use. Either way, there's definitely been an upswing from the EU elections, but it's unclear whether there has been one from the 2018 election (where, as a reminder, the right was 11 points ahead of the left).

[Estrella]

Have there been any exit polls (or just ordinary polls) with crosstabs by age/occupation/sex since 2018? I'm asking because it'd be interesting to know how the M5S voters defected to left/right in different demographics. With no data, I'd guess that it would make sense if they went left among the young, women and middle-ish class and right with older people, men and working class.

[palandio]

Yes, I'm aware that many people only vote for the presidency ballot and not for the lists. And sure, a significant part of it is low-propensity left-leaning voters bothering to cross out Bonaccini's name but not a list logo, but I don't think it's crazy to suggest that a few of them are people who are nationally right-wing but thought Bonaccini was the better candidate locally. It makes perfect sense given everything else we know about how this campaign went down (Borgonzoni being such a weak candidate that Salvini basically locked her away to run her campaign himself). If we want to measure the "real" national political mood in Emilia, the truth is probably somewhere in between the list and personal vote.

It's not crazy to suggest this, in fact I like that you are questioning some popular beliefs. But in this case a quantitative analysis of the election data doesn't seem to back it up. And on top keep in mind that Borgonzoni outperformed the right-wing lists by 33k votes. For every voter that split his ticket between a right-wing list and Bonaccini there must be an additional voter who voted for weak candidate Borgonzoni without voting for a right-wing list.

A quantitative analysis on the provincial level shows that the Bonaccini surplus over the left-wing lists (ER overall: 3.3%) correlates positively with the left-wing results themselves. (The exception being traditionally left-wing Reggio Emilia province where the surplus was relatively low.) In the provincial capitals (which nowadays mostly lean to the left of their provinces) the Bonaccini surplus was higher than in the rest of the respective provinces.
Another parameter that can be used is the turnout difference from the 2019 EU elections to the 2020 ER regional elections. Overall turnout went from 67.3% to 67.7%. But there were significant local differences. Rise in turnout was correlated to left-wing strength and a Bonaccini surplus. (Turnout in Reggio Emilia province fell from 69.2% to 68.0% which might explain the weak Bonaccini surplus.)
The most extreme example in all of this is Bologna city, a left-wing stronghold where turnout went from 63.3% to 69.8% and where the Bonaccini surplus was 4.3%.

Measuring the "real" national mood is a different and very complex question.

Anyway, here's some hard data to draw your own conclusion from. Election results of the 2018 parliamentary, 2019 European, and 2020 regional elections in both regions (president and list for ER; in Calabria there's only one vote). I included LeU on the "left" side but not the more extreme far-left lists.

[...]

Left-right swing from the 2018 elections:
- ER (president) +5.6
- ER (list) +0.5
- Calabria -12.9

Left-right swing from the 2019 elections:
- ER (president) +12.5
- ER (list) +7.4
- Calabria -2.8

The Calabria results are scary, but they can probably be safely dismissed given the low turnout and the peculiarity of local issues. Calabria has kicked out every incumbent government since the Second Republic and seems to largely just be disaffected from politics in general (see also M5S's results in 2018). The ER numbers are more meaningful, although again the question is which numbers do you use. Either way, there's definitely been an upswing from the EU elections, but it's unclear whether there has been one from the 2018 election (where, as a reminder, the right was 11 points ahead of the left).

It's difficult to talk about upswing or not compared to the 2018 election because of the complete Five Stars meltdown. The (simplified) common theory is that the right-leaning part of the former Five Stars voters mostly voted Lega already in the 2019 EU elections and that at least in ER the remaining left-leaning part mostly voted for the left. The problem for the left being that even if they can build the same voter coalition that voted for Bonaccini on the national level, it probably won't be enough, as long as the right-wing coalition sits at a comfortable >50%.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Interesting statistics. That's good to know.

[Beagle]

What's with the rise of FdI? They seem to be firmly above 10% in national polling, easily doubling the FI vote, and within MoE of M5S. Is there some particular reason or are the traditional FI voters just abandoning Berlusconi for a new and improved model?