If Enrico Letta's Pd fails to aggregate both Matteo Renzi's Italia Viva and Carlo Calenda's Action into the center-left alignment and if the electoral law tends to be the majority of the Rosatellum remains unchanged, the progressive alignment will face defeat in the next general elections and the center-right will return to Palazzo Chigi. With all the necessary precautions and, of course, barring unforeseen events, this is stated by the latest poll on voting intentions conducted for Il Sole 24 Ore after the last administrative elections by the political scientist and expert on electoral flows, Roberto D'Alimonte of Luiss.
The numbers speak for themselves: at present, the centre-left - made up of Pd, M5S, Sinistra and Verdi but without Renzi and without Calenda - is 6 points behind the centre-right formed by Forza Italia, Lega and Fratelli d'Italia - 43,4, 49,5% against 7,1% - while the parties outside the two major coalitions - Communist Lists, Action, Italia Viva - would collect 7%. According to the Sole survey, the news of the last few weeks are the electoral growth of Forza Italia which, by virtue of the new centrality of Silvio Berlusconi, would rise from 8-10% to over 15% and the decline of Giuseppe Conte's Five Stars which compared to a recent 16-11% they would drop to XNUMX%.
According to D'Alimonte, Berlusconi's new entry into the field and the at least apparent willingness of Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni to support him as the sole candidate of the center-right in the Quirinal race would have increased the consensus of Forza Italia. Quite the opposite of what is happening to the Five Stars: “Conte gasps. For months, his party has been looking for an identity and a strategy ”but for now it is“ in a sort of limbo (because) the old Movement is dead but the new one has not yet been born ”.
But the novelties of the survey are also other and the most important is that the Democratic Party, with its 22,8%, is the first party ahead of the League (21,7%) and the Brothers of Italy (19,1%) , but at the coalition level the balance of power is reversed and the centre-right is clearly in the lead. Unless Letta performs the miracle, which seems frankly unlikely today, to recover Renzi and Calenda. Mind you: to recapture and beat the center-right, Letta needs both reformist forces in the center and not just one because, according to the survey by the Sun, Azione di Calenda is credited with 3,4% and Italia Viva by Renzi by 2,7%. Either they both join the centre-left or the gap with the centre-right does not close.
Unless Letta and the Democratic Party put aside their grudges and resentments towards Renzi and Calenda, and get ready to attempt the only political operation that would allow the center-right to split by betting all their cards on a new proportional electoral law, in virtue of which every political force plays for itself - and therefore between Salvini and Meloni it would be a duel to the last vote - and alliances are made after closed polls. For now this is not the wind but the battle for the Quirinale and Renzi's shrewd move to support the candidacy of the Eurocommissioner and former prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, can perhaps reopen the game by messing up "extreme bipolarism" both dear to Letta but, polls in hand, destined to cause an almost certain defeat of the center-left.
