Former Italian PM Matteo Renzi. Matteo Renzi fights to save Italy (and himself) Former prime minister wants his old job back, but it looks increasingly unlikely.

ROME — Matteo Renzi had his game face on as he told his Democratic Party he was prepared to go "house to house" to win back power in Italy's general election.

But the former prime minister knows his moment of reckoning is fast approaching. When Italians go to the polls on March 4, there's a slim chance his party will come in first.

Renzi was upbeat as he addressed party colleagues in Rome Wednesday evening. “In [the] 2013 elections we failed by a nose, this time we need to be the largest party,” Renzi said as they met to discuss prospective candidates and their election program.

However, the polls make grim reading for the one-time golden boy of Italian, and European, politics. They put his center-left Democratic Party (PD) on around 24 percent of the vote, behind the populist 5Star Movement at 27 percent. Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party follows at almost 16 percent, with its far-right allies in the Northern League at 14 percent.

Renzi's personal popularity fares no better. A recent survey by pollster Ixe shows that only 25 percent of Italians trust him as a political leader, compared with 35 percent for the outgoing premier, Paolo Gentiloni.

To make matters worse, former friends in high places are deserting him and making their criticism public. “I always liked him as a person. I don’t understand what has happened to him,” Sergio Marchionne, boss of car giant Fiat Chrysler, said Tuesday at the Detroit Auto Show. “The Renzi that I used to support hasn’t been seen for a while.”

Wolfango Piccoli, head of research at Teneo Intelligence, was even blunter. “Renzi is a spent political force and the performance of the PD in March elections will determine the speed of his exit as party leader,” he said. “The man once known as ‘Demolition Man’ has become 'Recycling Man’ and embraced the old Italian way of doing politics.”

Fall from grace

After storming Italian politics in 2014 on promises to “demolish” the establishment, the former mayor of Florence became the youngest-ever Italian prime minister at just 39, attracting unprecedented support at home and plenty of attention abroad.

Renzi's galvanized party won more than 40 percent of the votes in the European election in May 2014, a rare bright spot for a Europe facing a populist onslaught. He returned to the theme at Wednesday's meeting, saying “Europe will be at the top of the electoral campaign” and calling for “more politics in Europe, which means to reject a technocratic approach.”

But the young leader’s attitude during almost three years in power alienated many within his own party. The PD's left wing disliked his strategy of pushing the party further toward the center and criticized his failure to improve the situation of young Italians and jumpstart Italy’s ailing economy.

The darkest chapter of Renzi’s political career came in December 2016, when Italian voters rejected a constitutional referendum to which he had tied his political future. He was forced to resign and was replaced by his party ally Paolo Gentiloni, a mild-mannered politician and about as different from Renzi as you could get.

A poor showing by the PD in the election would have implications beyond the Italian center left. It would complicate any attempt at creating a governing coalition, undermining the prospect of a stable government to consolidate Italy’s (small) economic recovery.

If the election produces a hung parliament, President Sergio Mattarella could ask Gentiloni to stay in post and try to form a coalition with the backing of the other main parties, including the center-right grouping led by a revived Silvio Berlusconi.

But where Berlusconi has forged close ties with the Northern League that have helped his electoral chances, Renzi has struggled to forge alliances, with the PD’s left-wing dissidents leaving to form their own group rather than work with him.

Party insiders say the PD can’t afford to fall below 25 percent in the election, a result that would seriously undermine Renzi’s ability to get his lieutenants key posts in any governing coalition and put his leadership at risk.

“In that scenario Renzi will have to make a responsible choice and leave Gentiloni to try to form a new coalition government,” said Massimiliano Panarari of Rome’s LUISS University. “But that would also mean handing over the keys of the party.”