From the Center for European Reform.

This is the CERR podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the CER podcast.

My name is Sophia Besh and I'm a research fellow here at the Center for European Reform.

And today I'm in conversation with Luigi Scansieri, who is another research fellow

here at the CR, and we're going to talk about the impending Italian elections. The elections are

in the 4th of March. Luigi, can you just start out by giving us an overview of who is in power

now, who are the parties that are running, and who is in the lead? Yes, absolutely. So the current

government is a centre-left, the centrist

government led by Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who has been in power for a few years now.

The landscape at the upcoming election is essentially made up of four different coalitions

that will run against each other. One is the centre-left coalition, so it made of the ruling

democratic party plus smaller centrist parties. There's a centre-left coalition, so made of the ruling democratic party plus smaller centrist parties.

There's a centre-right coalition, which is made up by Silvio Belosconi's Varsa Italia Party, the Northern League, and a smaller party called Brothers of Italy.

Then there's the five-star movement, which is running by itself.

It's refused alliances with any other parties. And there's a left-wing

coalition made up of some parties which split previously from the Democratic Party and smaller elements.

So currently, the polls paint a picture where it seems that no one is able to win the election outright.

So the centre-left is doing quite poorly. It's on slightly less

than 30%. The centre-right coalition is near 40%, and the five-star movement around 30%. But with these

numbers, the only one that may have a chance of forming government is the centre-right. But polls in

Italy are based on very small samples, usually usually so they're even less reliable than they are

...