Who are the politicians vying to lead Italy’s next government?

Giorgia Meloni leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party and can become the first female PM of the country

Letta, the 56-year-old leader of the Democratic Party, Italy’s main center-left force, is Meloni’s chief election rival.

Letta served as premier in a coalition including center-right forces after a 2013 election failed to yield a clear-cut majority. But he lost the premiership after barely 10 months when an ambitious fellow Democrat, Matteo Renzi, maneuvered to take the office for himself.

Burned by the ouster, Letta headed to teach in Paris at the prestigious Sciences Po university. With infighting chronically plaguing the Democrats, he returned to Italy to take back the reins of the party in March 2021.

Letta was foiled in his quest to build a solid center-left electoral alliance to challenge Meloni and her allies when the populist 5-Star Movement, the largest party in the outgoing Parliament, helped to collapse Draghi’s government this summer.

Salvini, the 49-year-old League party leader, had been the unchallenged face of right-wing leadership in Italy until Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party took off.

His party has roots in Italy’s industrial north. In a surprise move, he cut a deal in 2018 to govern with the 5-Star Movement, even after deriding the populist forces. A little more than a year later, he maneuvered to oust 5-Star leader Giuseppe Conte from the premiership, so he could take the office for himself. But Conte outmaneuvered Salvini and cut his own deal with the Democratic Party, forming a coalition government that left the League in the opposition.

As interior minister in Conte’s first government, Salvini pushed his hard line against migrants, especially those arriving by the tens of thousands in smugglers’ boats launched from Libya. Under his tenure, migrants rescued by humanitarian ships were kept for days or weeks aboard the overcrowded vessels because he refused to quickly let them disembark. Prosecutors in Sicily had him indicted on kidnapping charges over his policy. He has been found innocent in one case; another trial in Palermo is still going on.

The former Italian prime minister was speaking for the first time since he was hospitalised a month ago

A lawyer specializing in mediation, Conte, now 58, was plucked out of political obscurity to become premier in 2018 after the populist, euroskeptic 5-Star Movement he now heads stunned Italy’s establishment by sweeping nearly 33% of the vote to become Parliament’s largest party. When neither then-5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio nor right-wing leader Matteo Salvini budged on who would become premier, Conte got the job.

Some 15 months later, Conte’s government collapsed when Salvini made a botched move to take the premiership for himself. But Conte outsmarted Salvini by forming a new government that replaced the League with the center-left Democratic Party.

Early in his second stint as premier, Italy became the first nation in the West to be slammed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conte enforced one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns. But in January 2021, 16 months into Conte’s second government, it collapsed after Matteo Renzi, a former premier, yanked his small centrist party from the coalition.