The Ingredients for the Success of the Right-Wing Coalition in the Italian 2022 Parliamentary Elections

This paper attempts to reveal the configuration of conditions allowing the electoral victory of right-wing parties and their coalition building in the aftermath of the Autumn 2022 Italian elections. The paper is scientifically new, because the event under study is very recent, and therefore the number of studies written about it is quite small. Italian society and its voting behavior were analyzed following the logic of Angus Campbell's funnel of causality (a set of factors influencing the final vote, arranged along the temporal axis according to their significance so that some causes are the consequences of others). The study found that the key ingredient for the success of right-wing parties was the social demand for change, spurred by economic stagnation (a serious drop in economic growth rates) and political crises (regular changes in governments as a result of parties leaving coalitions), which have become permanent in Italy over the past few years. The trends that permeate the structure of Italian society, provoking social cleavages, which motivate a number of voters to opt for right-wing candidates, also played an important role. Other reasons for the right-wing victory were related to the measures taken by the coalition itself, such as its consolidation, which enabled the parties to act as a single coordinated force (something that cannot be said about its rivals on the other side of the ideological spectrum), successful rebranding, consisting both in a change in self-representation and in softening rhetoric towards competitors, and a revision of foreign policy positions.

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