Are they all the same? The Italian populist parties in parliament

On 13 June 2023, the day after the death of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, many Italian and foreign newspapers described him as “the first populist in Europe”. By now, Italy has a thirty-year tradition of populist parties, started precisely with the foundation of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) in 1993. Since then, the Italian parliament has counted another three major populist parties – Northern League (Lega Nord - LN), Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia - FdI) and Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle - M5S) –, while the first fully-fledged populist government in Western Europe (Conte I, formed of Five Star Movement and Lega) got in office in Italy in 2018 (Paparo 2018). With the sole, although fundamental exception of the Five Star Movement, which is considered as a valence populist party (Zulianello 2020; Zulianello and Larsen 2023), all the other Italian populists are rightist parties. Hence, at a general level, this paper wonders whether the behaviour of the abovementioned Italian parties in parliament is driven by their populism or by their ideological position (Otjes and Louwerse 2015). In this regard, we aim at comparing the valence populists (M5S) with the right-wing populists (FI, Lega, FdI), but also the rightist populists between each other. In addition, focusing on the last three legislative terms (XVII, XVIII and XIX), we intend to explore if and how their behaviour changed according to their role of government or opposition parties. Using data about parliamentary groups’ voting behaviour and weekly question time at the Chamber of Deputies, this work speaks both to scholarship on populist parties and to legislative studies, helping to understand how populist parties conceive and carry out their representative role within the institutions.