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Updated January 26th, 2020 at 17:03 IST

Polls open in important regional vote in Italy

His opponent is a little-known League politician, Lucia Borgonzoni, who lost the 2016 Bologna mayoral race. But it is Matteo Salvini, the firebrand former interior minister, who has been the face of the League's campaign.

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The residents of Italy's second richest region headed to the polls on Sunday for a regional election with possibly much wider implications. Despite favorable job ratings and a strong local economy, Democratic Party incumbent regional president Stefano Bonaccini has found himself in the role of underdog in the vote.

His opponent is a little-known League politician, Lucia Borgonzoni, who lost the 2016 Bologna mayoral race. But it is Matteo Salvini, the firebrand former interior minister, who has been the face of the League's campaign. The League's growing strength in Emilia-Romagna was already clear in last year's European elections, when it was the top-vote getter, beating the Democratic Party by 2.5%.

While a League victory cannot prompt the government to fall automatically, the 5-Star Movement-Democratic Party coalition that was put together to block Salvini's clumsy power grab in the summer remains shaky and could fall on any number of pretexts.

It has failed, for example, to come to decisions on a number of outstanding industrial issues — like how to save Alitalia, the future of a failing steel mill in the south and whether to revoke a lucrative highway management contract with a private firm following the 2018 fatal bridge collapse in Genoa.

The coalition has been further weakened by Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio's resignation this week as the political leader of the 5-Star Movement - a casualty of the movement's waning popularity with voters, poor performance in other recent regional elections and a string of defections by its own lawmakers.

(Image Credit: AP)

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Published January 26th, 2020 at 17:03 IST

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