European elections: Giorgia Meloni gets personal as Italy votes

Italians will be able to cast their votes until late on Sunday evening when elsewhere in Europe the elections have already wrapped up.

The Netherlands voted on Thursday, and a Dutch exit poll suggested a tight race between a left-green alliance, narrowly ahead of anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party. An estimated turnout of 47% was the highest since 1989, rebutting any suggestion that voters had tired of politics.

Irish and Czech voters went to the polls on Friday.

Slovakia, Latvia and Malta also vote on Saturday, while Czechs vote for a second day.

Several Czech parties from different political groups in the European Parliament have formed a joint candidate list as a “cordon sanitaire” to counter populists from the ANO party of former Prime Minister Andrej Babis.

Germany is among the EU countries voting on Sunday, and latest polls indicate that the centre-right CDU/CSU may leapfrog Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party.

His party is fighting for second place with coalition partners the Greens and far-right opposition party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The AfD has been involved in a series of recent scandals over foreign interference, espionage and accusations of Nazism.

In France, which has the second largest number of MEPs in the parliament after Germany, President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party is also vying for second place with a resurgent Socialist party under top candidate Raphaël Glucksmann.

Both parties are trailing Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), which is consistently polling above 30%.

Calling for a high turnout in a TV interview on the penultimate day of the campaign, Mr Macron warned that “Europe has never been so threatened” by the surge of the right.

Other leaders have adopted a similarly urgent tone before the EU vote.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who is recovering from surgery at home after last month’s assassination attempt, returned to the political scene this week with a well-timed attack on Slovakia’s liberal opposition, the “anti-government media” and foreign-funded NGOs which he said had created a climate of hatred and intolerance that made the shooting possible.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban – who has been the most vocal opponent of EU support for Ukraine – warned that Europe was reaching a point of no return in terms of preventing conflict from spilling beyond the borders of Ukraine, and hit out at what he called the EU’s “war psychosis”.

Polls in Italy will be the last to close at 23:00 (21:00 GMT) on Sunday.

A projection, combining the first provisional results from some EU member states with estimates for the rest, will come out soon after.