“At least it was a contest – I’m happy even if I lost.” Matteo Salvini put a brave face on last night’s election result, after his far-right League failed to capture the historic red fortress of Emilia-Romagna. In recent weeks, Salvini had tried to turn the regional contest into a referendum on national politics – bidding to give a final “shove” to the teetering Five Star-Democratic coalition and force an early general election. Yet the League’s much-expected final breakthrough will have to wait. The northern Italian region’s incumbent Democratic president Stefano Bonaccini took 51.4 per cent of the vote, as against 43.6 per cent for his League rival Lucia Borgonzoni – a less close outcome than most polls had predicted.
The centre-left’s relief at the result was palpable. An op-ed in La Repubblica bore the title “Stalingrad has not fallen;” the Democrats’ national leader Nicola Zingaretti tweeted a photo of himself receiving news of the result, sat with his feet on his desk and his face adorned by a beaming smile. Insisting that the national government had emerged strengthened from this test, Zingaretti also paid tribute to the Sardines movement whose mass protests have spread across the region, and Italy, in recent months as a demonstration of civic opposition to Salvini (the movement’s name is a reference to the densely packed participants).
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