In Meloni's Italy, left-wing parties struggle
ROME
Hundreds of thousands of people attended protests in Rome last month hailed as a show of strength against Giorgia Meloni's hard-right government, but Italy's divided opposition is struggling to make an impact.
Almost three years after its historic election victory, Meloni's far-right Brothers of Italy party remains the most popular, polling at 29 percent, above the 26 percent it secured in the September 2022 vote, according to the latest YouTrend survey.
The prime minister herself tops polls of party leaders with an approval rating of 45 percent, according to Ipsos.
The traditional left is struggling across Europe, where populist parties, particularly the far-right, have gained ground in recent years.
And in Italy, which once had Western Europe's largest Communist Party, "there is a crisis in the left," commented Paolo Borioni, professor of political science at Rome's Sapienza University.
He said left-wing parties had "severed their historical class ties," notably with those on lower incomes.
The opposition is dominated by the center-left Democratic Party (PD), currently polling at around 22 percent, and the Five Star Movement, with around 13 percent.
Marc Lazar, a professor at Sciences Po Paris and Luiss University in Rome, said both are paying the price for their record in government, where they "disappointed, they did not address social issues."
The PD adopted several measures that liberalized the labor market and cut public spending while in power after the 2013 election. Since then, it has lost over 3 million votes.
For Dario Salvetti, an auto industry worker from Florence, the left is "broken," "disconnected from the masses" in a country where salaries have been stalled for decades and one in ten Italians is classified as living in poverty.
For analyst Borioni, there is "no rightward shift in the population in Italy," just more people are abandoning the left.
