What Italy's election results tell us about the country and its future

euronews.com:

The right-wing coalition led by the far-right party Brothers of Italy seems set to win Italy’s snap general elections, with leader Giorgia Meloni widely expected to form the new government and become the country's first female prime minister.

But how did the country, emerging from two years of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and struggling with rising inflation and a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, get to this result? And what does this tell us about Italy’s future?

We asked these and more questions to three experts on Italian politics.

According to exit polls and early predictions, the right-wing coalition led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and accompanied by Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won 43.79 per cent of the vote.

The centre-left was left trailing behind with 26.13 per cent of the vote, followed by the Five Star Movement with 15.42 per cent.

According to Davide Vampa, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, although the right-wing coalition has won with an overwhelming majority compared to the votes gathered by the other parties, the numbers obtained are modest overall.

"The right-wing bloc got more or less the same votes as in 2018," said Vampa. "So it's true that they won and it was a landslide victory, but that was mainly due to the divisions of the left, centre-left and PD and Five Star Movement," he said. 

But the rise of Brothers of Italy is an exception, he added.

"It's also true that there has been the impressive growth of Brothers of Italy, and this is probably due to the fact that Brothers of Italy was the only part in opposition, it has been in opposition for the last five years whereas all the other