Former Italy's prime minister Matteo Renzi | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images Matteo Renzi to leave Italy’s Democratic Party Former prime minister is expected to announce the breakup on Tuesday.

ROME — Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is set to leave the Democratic Party and create a new centrist group.

The decision will be announced Tuesday morning in an interview with the center-right daily Il Giornale. According to two PD officials and the publication's editor-in-chief Alessandro Sallusti, Renzi will create a new political party in the lower house of parliament while in the Senate (where new political groups cannot be established once a parliamentary term has begun) a group of lawmakers will leave the PD and become unaffiliated.

In the interview in Il Giornale, Renzi will say that he called Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Monday to inform him about the decision and say he was still loyal to the new PD-5Star Movement government. Renzi also said he received a call from Culture Minister Dario Franceschini to tell him he was making a "mistake and would become irrelevant."

The decision is expected to cause turmoil within the PD and weaken the coalition. The two parties don't have a majority in the Senate and rely on support from the far-left Free and Equal (LeU) party as well as non-affiliated lawmakers. With Renzi, who is currently a senator, leaving and possibly as many as a dozen senators ready to follow him, the former prime minister would have great power over the government.

Parliamentary rules require new groups in the Chamber of Deputies to have at least 20 members. According to one PD lawmaker, some members of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia could join Renzi's new group.

Earlier this month, Renzi, who strongly advocated for a PD-5Stars alliance to avoid a snap election, told POLITICO a potential break from the PD was merely "boring gossip."

On Sunday, Renzi ally Ettore Rosato said the breakup would be a "consensual separation" but a few hours later, PD leader Nicola Zingaretti made clear there is no such thing. Speaking at a party conference in Turin, he said: "I hope the split doesn't happen. The party's unity is absolutely necessary for democracy and for the government's stability."