Joseph Daul, the chairman of the right-of-centre European People’s Party in the European Parliament, has made clear that the party’s candidate for February’s Italian general election is incumbent Prime Minister Mario Monti and not the People of Freedom Party (PDL) President Silvio Berlusconi, who represented the conservatives for almost 20 years. Following Berlusconi’s anti-European turn in the campaign to distance himself from Monti, many of his party’s European partners are mulling the PDL’s expulsion from the EPP.