Centre-right candidate Vito Bardi is set to become the new governor of the southern region of Basilicata.
With the lion's share of the ballots counted after Sunday's regional election, Bardi has around 42% of the vote. He is followed by centre-left candidate Carlo Trerotola with around 32%. The 5-Star Movement's Antonio Mattia was third with around 20.6%, although the anti-establishment group, which ran alone without alliance partners, looks set to be the individual party with the most votes. The M5S was followed by Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini's League, which is the driving force of the centre right and is on course to get close to 19% of the vote.
Although the M5S and the League are partners in the coalition government at national level, they are not allied in regional and local votes. The result continues a long string of victories for the centre right in regional elections in a vote that was also seen as an important gauge of public feeling ahead of May's European elections.
"THANK YOU!" Salvini said via Facebook.
"The League has trebled its votes, victory in Basilicata! 7-0 (to us), goodbye to the left, now Europe is going to change". Fellow Deputy Premier and Labour and Industry Minister Luigi Di Maio dismissed talk that M5S had performed badly, given that its share of the vote was down significantly with respect to the support it got in the region in last year's general election.
"The 5-Star Movement is the top political group in Basilicata," said Di Maio. "Most of the press are talking about the number of votes (for the M5S) being halved in a year and a 'collapse,' but the truth is that we beat all the other lists". He said that the real losers were the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia, which look set to get around 9% and 8% respectively.
Trerotola said that his alliance had lost with "dignity" in a region that is traditionally a centre-left stronghold while admitting that he had hoped to get more votes.
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