I’m going to vote for the ‘least worst’ is a typical reaction among the electorate on polling day

Italians casting their votes in Sunday’s general election were united in only one respect: they were angry and fed-up.

The country has come a long way since it was rocked by a severe economic downturn in 2011 but voters went into the polling booths with plenty of worries – that the political class is out of touch, that there are too few good jobs, that corruption is rife and there are no good solutions to a seemingly endless migration crisis without much help from Europe.

The main party leaders have offered little inspiration for the disillusioned. Luigi Di Maio a 31-year-old maverick whose most recent job experience includes being a waiter, leads Italy’s most popular single party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which had, until recently, refused to consider working with other parties in coalition.

The former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, an 81-year-old who has won three previous elections and was forced out of office in disrepute, heads the centre-right party Forza Italia, whose far-right allies are predicted to emerge as the largest bloc in parliament but fall short of a majority. They include La Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, the 44-year-old xenophobe who has sought to exploit the migrant crisis for political advantage.

“I’m going to vote for the ‘least worst’,” said Simona, a 42-year-old bookseller in Palermo. “That’s what Italians have been doing for years; we have just voted to avoid catastrophes.”

Sicily is a key electoral battleground. While the region used to be a stronghold for Berlusconi, it has recently shown strong support for M5S, which has appealed to voters with its anti-establishment, Eurosceptic and anti-corruption message.

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For Caterina, a 62-year-old house cleaner, one choice does not seem much better than the other. “I’m just going to vote because is my civic duty. But I don’t have any hopes in these guys in Rome. They are all the same,” she said.

In Orvieto, a town in Umbria, in central Italy, which was a communist stronghold for years, Marcello Mencarelli, 76, decided to back Lega’s Salvini, who has vowed to toughen asylum rules and to begin mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of migrants found to be in Italy illegally. It is not a plan that is considered realistic, but Salvini – who campaigned as part of the centre right coalition headed by Berlusconi – set the tone on the immigration debate in the election campaign.

“I’m voting for Salvini’s Lega because he promises to get rid of all the illegal immigrants,” said Mencarelli, who has previously voted for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Christian Democrats.



But, revealing the complexity of the issue, and many Italians’ unease with Salvini’s fiery and often racist rhetoric, Mencarelli’s good friend Mario, a staunch communist, has backed Free and Equal, a left-wing splinter group formed by Pietro Grasso, a former Democratic party speaker of the senate who has been likened to Jeremy Corbyn. “We need a left-wing government,” he insisted. “The way the right wing exploits immigration is vulgar.”

La Lega, formerly known as the Northern League, has even began to win support in southern Italy during the campaign, despite the fact that the once secessionist party used to cast all southern Italians as lazy and drags on the rest of the country. However, Salvini’s Euroscepticism and his views against migrants are starting to resonate among some in Sicily.

“I tell you the truth, I’m Sicilian and have voted for Salvini,” said Daniel Silvestri, 25, a tourist entertainer. “I’m tired of all the lies of politicians in the last years. Only a shock can lead to a change.”



Sandro, who declined to give his surname, and his wife waited for more than two hours to cast their votes. “It’s so badly organised I’m convinced it’s a ploy to make us walk away from voting,” he said.

He declined to reveal who he voted for but said: “None of the contenders are experienced enough to run a government, maybe it’s time to try the young ones.”