Next Italian general election
The next Italian general election is due to be held in Italy no later than 1 June 2023. As a result of the 2020 Italian constitutional referendum, the size of the Italian Parliament will be reduced in this election. Under the amended Constitution of Italy, there will be 400 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 200 elected members of the Senate of the Republic, down from 630 and 315, respectively. Background. In the 2018 Italian general election, no political group or party won an outright majority, resulting in a hung parliament. On 4 March, the  centre-right coalition, in which Matteo Salvini's League emerged as the main political force, won a plurality of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate, while the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio became the party with the largest number of votes. The centre-left coalition, led by Matteo Renzi of the governing Democratic Party (PD), came third. Due the PD and centre-left's poor results, Renzi resigned on 12 March, his place being taken "ad interim" by Maurizio Martina. The League's Salvini continued the Italian nationalist turn it  took into the 2018 general election. In October 2018, Lega per Salvini Premier (LSP), which was founded as a sister party to promote Salvini's candidature as Prime Minister of Italy. Political commentators have since described it as a parallel party of the League, with the aim of politically replacing the latter, which had been burdened by a statutory debt of €49 million. The LSP's statute presented it as a nationalist and souverainist party. On 22 January 2020, four days before the regional elections, Di Maio resigned as the M5S leader, and was replaced "ad interim" by Vito  Crimi. First Conte government. As a result of the hung parliament, protracted negotiations were required before a new government could be formed. The talks between the M5S and the League resulted in the proposal of the self-declared Government of Change under the leadership of Giuseppe Conte, a university law professor close to the M5S. After some bickering with President Sergio Mattarella, Conte's cabinet, which was dubbed by the media as Western European "first all-populist government", was sworn in on 1 June. The European Parliament elections, held in May 2019, were a win for the League, which obtained  34 percent of the vote and 20 seats, more than any other party in the country. In August 2019, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini announced a motion of no confidence against Conte after growing tensions within the majority. Many political analysts believe the no confidence motion was an attempt to force early elections to improve the League's standing in the Italian Parliament, ensuring Salvini could become the next Prime Minister. On 20 August, following the parliamentary debate in which he accused Salvini of being a political opportunist who "had triggered the political crisis only to serve his personal interest , Prime Minister Conte resigned his post to President Mattarella. After the 2018 general election, the M5S started a decline in both opinion polls, deputies and senators, and election results, starting with the 2019 European Parliament election in Italy. After the meagre results, Di Maio won a vote of confidence in his leadership and pledged to reform the party. In the general election held in March 2018, the M5S had won 227 deputies and 112 senators; by February 2022, the party had declined to 157 deputies and 62 senators, though it remained the biggest party in the parliament. Defections gave parliamentary 	Next Italian general election
20460603	representation to Alternative, the Communist Party, the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), Italexit, and Power to the People (PaP). Second Conte government. On 21 August, President Mattarella started the consultations with all the parliamentary groups. On the same day, the national direction of the PD officially opened to a cabinet with the M5S, based on pro-Europeanism, a green economy, sustainable development, the fight against economic inequality, and a new immigration policy. As the talks resulted in an unclear outcome, President Mattarella announced a second round of consultation for 27 or 28 August. In the days that preceded the second round	Next Italian general election
20460604	, a confrontation between the PD and the M5S started, while the left-wing parliamentary group LeU announced that its support for a potential M5S–PD cabinet. On 28 August, the PD's newly elected secretary Nicola Zingaretti announced at the Quirinal Palace his favorable position on forming a new government with the M5S, with Conte at its head. On the same day, Mattarella summoned Conte to the Quirinal Palace for 29 August to give him the task of forming a new cabinet. On 3 September, members of the M5S voted on the Rousseau platform in favor of an agreement with 	Next Italian general election
20460605	the PD under the premiership of Conte, with more than 79% of votes out of nearly 80,000 voters. On 4 September, Conte announced the ministers of his new cabinet, which was sworn in at the Quirinal Palace on the following day. On 18 September, Renzi left the PD to found the liberal party Italia Viva (IV); he then joined the government with IV to keep the League and Salvini out of power. In October 2019, Parliament approved the Fraccaro Reform, named after Riccardo Fraccaro, the M5S deputy who was the bill's first signatory. The fourth and final vote in 	Next Italian general election
20460606	the Chamber of Deputies came on 8 October 2019, with 553 votes in favor and 14 against. In the final vote, the bill was supported by both the majority and the opposition; only the liberal party More Europe (+Eu) and other small groups voted against. The reform provided a cut in the number of MPs, which would shrink from 630 to 400 deputies and from 315 to 200 senators. On 20–21 September 2020, Italians largely approved the reform with nearly 70% of votes. In January 2020, Italy became one of the countries worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conte	Next Italian general election
20460607	's government was the first in the Western world to implement a national lockdown to stop the spread of the disease. Despite being widely approved by public opinion, the lockdown was also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the Italian Republic. Draghi government. In January 2021, Renzi's IV withdrew its support for Conte's government, starting a government crisis. Although Conte was able to win confidence votes in Parliament in the subsequent days, he chose to resign due to failing to reach an absolute majority in the Senate. After negotiations to form a 	Next Italian general election
20460608	third Conte cabinet failed, Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, became Prime Minister on 13 February at the head of a national unity government composed of independent technocrats and politicians from the League, M5S, PD, FI, IV, and LeU. In March 2021, the PD's secretary Zingaretti resigned after growing tensions within the PD, with the party's minority accusing him for the management of the government crisis. Many prominent members of the party asked to former Prime Minister Enrico Letta to become the new leader; on 14 March, he was elected as the new secretary 	Next Italian general election
20460609	by the PD's national assembly. In August 2021, Conte was elected president of the M5S. In February 2022, a Naples' court ruled in favour of three M5S activists, suspending Conte's presidency. On 19 February, Conte appealed to the court's decision, on the grounds that he was not aware of the 2018 party statute, which provided for the exclusion from voting of those who had joined the M5S for less than six months, and the voting procedure was valid. In 2019, several M5S officials had criticized former leader Di Maio after the transparency of the Rousseau's platform	Next Italian general election
20460610	, the online platform used by the party, questioned earlier on in the year. In the presidential election held in late January 2022, President Mattarella was re-elected, despite having ruled out a second term, after the governing parties asked him to do so when no other candidate was viable. In February 2022, four former M5S deputies (Silvia Benedetti, Yana Ehm, Doriana Sarli, and Simona Suriano) formed the parliamentary group ManifestA, a merge of the PaP and PRC parties, whose name echoes The Communist Manifesto" with a female pronoun as an invitation to mobilisation. Electoral system. After the 2020 Italian constitutional  referendum, the Italian electoral law of 2017 ("Rosatellum"), used in 2018 Italian general election, was initially expected to be replaced entirely or its single-member districts (FPTP) be redesigned on the Italian territory for the next elections with 600 MPs. The single-member districts changes were eventually approved and published on 30 December 2020 in "Gazzetta Ufficiale", the Italian government gazette; the Chamber of Deputies went down from 232 to 147 districts, while the Senate was down from 116 to 74. Date of the election. According to articles 60 and 61 of the Constitution of Italy, the election of both  houses of the Italian Parliament must take place every five years and no later than seventy days after the end of the previous legislature. Parties and leaders. This is a list of the main active parties that would likely participate in the election and are polled in most opinion surveys.