Matteo Salvini’s euroskeptic League party has triumphed in voting in Umbria, a tiny Italian region that was a longtime leftist stronghold.
Center-right candidate for the presidency of the Umbria Region, Donatella Tesei, prepares to cast her ballot at a polling station in Montefalco, Italy, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2019. Voting for the governor of the small region of Umbria is being watched as a first electoral test of the uneasy-coalition of governing parties’s popularity. The two main parties in Premier Giuseppe Conte’s new government, the populist 5-Star Movement, and the center-left Democratic Party, teamed up in a campaign alliance for the Umbria governorship. (Matteo Crocchioni/ANSA via AP/MANILA BULLETIN)
Results Monday from balloting a day earlier in Umbria for the region’s governor gave a coalition headed by Salvini and including the far-right Brothers of Italy party and former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia party a combined 57.5 percent of the votes.
A coalition anchored by the populist 5-Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party took a trouncing with 37.5 percent. Left-wing forces had governed Umbria for nearly 50 years.
Nationally, the 5-Stars and the Democrats govern Italy in an uneasy alliance of rivals formed by Premier Giuseppe Conte to keep Salvini from power.
Salvini said the Umbria triumph shows “Italians don’t like betrayals.”
Conte insists the dismal result won’t affect his government’s viability.