CHIETI, Italy — Maria Flacco represents everything that is likely to go wrong in this weekend’s election for former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party.

The 83-year-old grandmother is a former Renzi fan and the widow of a local left-wing activist from this small city in Abruzzo, the mountainous region east of Rome. But for the first time in her life, Flacco isn’t planning to vote.

“I don’t believe in Renzi’s promises anymore, just like I never believed in Silvio Berlusconi’s,” she says, referring to the former prime minister who is Renzi’s rival on the right.

The most likely outcomes of the parliamentary election on March 4 are a hung parliament or protracted negotiations as political leaders struggle to gather enough support to govern.

But one thing seems clear: Renzi’s Democratic Party is expected to take a pummeling.

Abruzzo overwhelmingly backed the 5Stars when the party burst on the scene in 2013.

Italy prohibits publishing voter intentions in the two weeks before an election, but polls taken just before the ban went into effect on February 19 put the party’s support at under 23 percent of the vote. That’s compared to the 41 percent it raked in during the 2014 European election just after Renzi became prime minister.

The drop in support is particularly acute in the south — where polls predict the Democratic Party and its allies will lose every seat they currently hold — and nowhere more so than in Abruzzo, where the country’s economic woes continue to bite.

Like Flacco, many former Democratic Party voters in Abruzzo are either abstaining or planning to vote for Berlusconi’s center-right coalition or the anti-establishment 5Star Movement. According to the latest polls, the 5Stars and the center right are almost neck-and-neck in all of the region's five constituencies in the lower house of parliament, with the 5Stars ahead in four out of five.

“We lost our savings when our local bank went bust in 2015,” says Flacco, explaining why she plans to abstain. “My older grandchildren moved up north because they struggled to find jobs here, and the factory where my son-in-law was employed as a construction worker shut down.”

Her grandson Max turned 18 last summer and proudly plans to vote for the 5Stars. Flacco says she tried to persuade him “that voting 5Stars isn’t a good idea,” but he’s convinced because of “the stuff he reads on Facebook” and hears from his dad, who is 51 years old and unemployed for the first time in his life.

5Star stronghold

Abruzzo overwhelmingly backed the 5Stars when the party burst on the scene in 2013, and its leader, Luigi Di Maio, kicked off his campaign down the hill from Chieti in Pescara, Abruzzo’s biggest city.

"Abruzzo is the region where the civic movement, Friends of Beppe Grillo, [a precursor to the 5Star Movement] was born 10 years ago," says Sara Marcozzi, a regional councilor for the 5Stars in Abruzzo. “Our results throughout the [Italian south] are outstanding because it's where the 5Stars were born."

According to Marco Sonsini, a partner at Rome-based lobbying firm Telos, the battle in the region will be between Berlusconi’s center-right coalition and the 5Stars. “In Abruzzo, the PD will pay the price of Renzi’s unpopularity, the draconian cuts to services and spending at a regional level and a slower than average recovery,” he says.

Abruzzo is the only southern region that posted negative growth in 2017, with its GDP dropping 0.2 percent. Last year, the region lost three times as many residents as the average nationally or in the south. Almost a quarter of its population is 65 or older, and one in two young people there are unemployed.

“Abruzzo’s economy has continued to lose ground in the past two years,” says Adriano Giannola, president of Svimez, the association for the industrial development of southern Italy. “The headlines talk about a recovery but the reality down south is a very different story.”

The 5Stars aren't the only threat to the Democratic Party's success. A police officer from the regional capital, L’Aquila, who did not want to be identified because he is not allowed to speak to the media, says he is voting for Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s party, once again. “At the end of the day, Berlusconi and the Northern League are the only ones who promise to tackle migration and security issues,” he says.

In June 2017, right-wing candidate Pierluigi Biondi was elected mayor after 10 years of Democratic Party rule. "Where a valid alternative to the 5Stars exists, voters will choose it," says Biondi, a member of Brothers of Italy, a far-right party running in coalition with Berlusconi.

Almost a decade after the devastating earthquake that killed 309 people and injured over 1,600 in 2009, L’Aquila has still not been entirely rebuilt. Cristina Caccia, a divorced mother of two, says she is still living with her brother and his family 30 kilometers from the city and commuting to work every day. She isn’t heading to the polls this year. She doesn’t think left, right or 5Stars will make a difference.

'No jobs, no services'

According to Livio Sarchese, a lawyer and 5Stars city councilor in the coastal town of Francavilla al Mare, the Democratic Party’s politics are far removed from people’s needs. “There are no jobs, services have been cut, and industrial giants like Honeywell are shutting down and leaving hundreds of families jobless,” he says. “People are turning to us because we understand the needs of common people.”

The U.S. conglomerate Honeywell produces turbochargers for the automotive industry. It employs about 420 workers in Atessa, near Chieti, but it is planning to relocate production to Slovakia in April.

The case, along with a similar one regarding the Turin-based Brazilian multinational Embraco, was brought to European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s attention on February 20 by the Italian industry minister, Carlo Calenda.

Unlike Embraco, however, Honeywell and the workers, with Calenda’s help, reached a monetary agreement. The company will also grant the use of the factory’s site free of charge to whoever wants to invest and rehire at least 30 percent of the workforce. Nevertheless, the closure is likely to help Euroskeptic parties like the Northern League and the 5Stars with voters who feel savaged by globalization and let down by Brussels.

“Most of my colleagues and their families see it the same way: Berlusconi and Renzi had their chance to govern and didn’t meet our expectations" — Rocco Salvatore Iezzi

Trade unionist Luciano Ianni says morale is very low among the workers and predicts that the social impact of Honeywell's delocalization will be enormous. “We wrote to every single Italian representative at the European Parliament last summer and no one ever wrote back,” he says. “Commissioner Vestager should have been involved much earlier.”

Ianni plans to give PD another chance because of Deputy Regional Governor Giovanni Lolli's support to the workers’ cause during the past few months.

Unmet expectations

Honeywell isn’t an isolated case in Abruzzo.

Research by Intesa Sanpaolo shows regional exports increased by more than 6 percent last year, with wine and furniture exports peaking at +11 percent and +8.5 percent, respectively. The manufacturing industry grew by 3.4 percent and the automotive district, which includes the Honda Italia and Sevel, a joint venture between Peugeot Citroën and Fiat, is still strong.

But Lolli, the deputy governor, says he recognizes that while some technology and export focused companies are moving forward “at full gallop,” many small and medium enterprises in the region are suffering from the tightening of bank credit.

“Although the worst part of the economic crisis is behind us, the effects have been devastating and what is left is a generalized sense of uncertainty among people,” Lolli says.

According to data from the national association of chambers of commerce, Unioncamere, between 2012 and 2017 about 3.2 percent of all companies ceased their activity, twice as many than the national average.

“The fact is the region, unlike the rest of the south, was more industrialized to begin with and it now pays the price of large-sized companies’ crisis,” Svimez’s Giannola says.

The regional government says it faces significant challenges because of some €780 million in debt it inherited and the fallout of the 2009 and 2016 earthquakes. Nevertheless, Abruzzo was granted €2.5 billion in financing from the EU and Rome to fund infrastructure projects.

Rocco Salvatore Iezzi, who has worked for Honeywell since it opened in 1996, isn’t buying it.

A former PD voter, Iezzi intends to vote for the 5Stars this time. “It’s a protest vote,” he says. “Most of my colleagues and their families see it the same way: Berlusconi and Renzi had their chance to govern and didn’t meet our expectations.”

Amid a generalized sense of unease and persisting economic difficulties, people are keen to “give the only political force that has never ruled the country a chance,” he adds.