ROME (AP) — Italy's political parties are scrambling to solidify coalitions and find viable candidates at the two-month mark before March 4 parliamentary elections, working under a complicated new electoral law designed to improve governing stability.
Recent polls give the center-right the lead with around 40 percent of the vote. Ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and the head of the anti-immigrant Northern League, Matteo Salvini, had an initial phone call to discuss strategy and platforms ahead of a planned meeting next week.
Smaller parties, though, were still cobbling together alliances to put forward parliamentary candidates by the Jan. 29 deadline. The new voting system seeks to encourage stability and coalition-building through the creation of colleges that field candidates, but it has posed problems for niche parties trying to go it alone.
On Thursday, longtime radical leader Emma Bonino announced an alliance of her own after denouncing as undemocratic the new law's requirement that new or small parties outside parliament get thousands of signatures before being allowed to field candidates. In the end, Bonino found an ally for her new +Europe party with another small party in the center-left, the Democratic Center, and can skip the signature-gathering effort.
The deal salvaged the longtime alliance between the radicals and the ruling Democratic Party, which has seen factions splinter off in the year since Matteo Renzi lost a political gamble with a failed referendum. The infighting has contributed to the showing by the center-left in recent polls, trailing the center-right by several percentage points.
The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, meanwhile, was having problems of its own after its online self-candidacy platform crashed. The 5-Star candidate for premier, Luigi Di Maio, said Thursday the greater-than-expected digital turnout was proof that the movement, which prides itself on its social media outreach, is the answer to political apathy in Italy.
The 5-Stars are the largest bloc in parliament but have ruled out forming coalitions.
