The leader of Italy’s Democratic Party, Matteo Renzi, has decided to step down after Sunday’s general election rout, Ansa news agency reported. Renzi’s spokesman, however, said he can’t confirm it.
A center-left bloc led by the ex-prime minister’s party scored some 23 percent, according to projections. It now trails the center-right bloc of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Euroskeptic Lega Nord as well as the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.
Renzi’s spokesman told Reuters that he had heard nothing about any decision to step down.
“This is a very clear defeat for us,” Michele Martina, a top figure in Renzi’s party, told reporters earlier on Monday. “We are expecting a result below our expectations… This is very clearly a negative result for us,” he said.
Andrea Marcucci, one of the party’s lawmakers, admitted that voters “have spoken very clearly and irrefutably.”
“The populists have won and the Democratic Party has lost,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Renzi’s rival in Sunday’s election, Matteo Salvini, leader of the Euroskeptic Lega Nord party, has said that his bloc with Berlusconi “won” the elections and can govern.
In the meantime, Professor Marco Bassani told RT that the shake-up of the Italian political scene is rooted in the migration problem, adding that Renzi’s Democrats are “pretty much gone.”