The 2022 Italian presidential election was held in Rome between 24 and 29 January 2022. The president of Italy was elected by a joint assembly composed of the Italian Parliament and regional representatives. The election process extended over multiple days, culminating in incumbent president Sergio Mattarella being confirmed for a second term, with a total of 759 votes on the eighth ballot. This was the second most votes (after Sandro Pertini in 1978) ever received by a presidential candidate. Mattarella became the second president to be re-elected, his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano being the first.
Mattarella had initially ruled out a second term. On 29 January, he agreed to serve a second term, as most party leaders and Mario Draghi, the prime minister of Italy, asked him to accept their joint nomination for another term. Mattarella had previously already received significant and growing support in several rounds of voting, namely 125 votes on the third ballot, 166 votes on the fourth ballot, 336 votes on the sixth ballot, and 387 votes on the seventh ballot. Among Italian presidential elections, the 2022 election had the highest number of ballots since 1992, when Oscar Luigi Scalfaro was elected on the 16th ballot.
History
Political background (2015–2021)
The incumbent president Sergio Mattarella was elected in 2015 by the Italian Parliament and regional representatives. Mattarella was supported by the centre-left coalition, led by then-prime minister and secretary of the Democratic Party (PD) Matteo Renzi, and gained broad support. The result of the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum led to Renzi's resignation and to the formation of the Gentiloni Cabinet headed by Paolo Gentiloni, at the time a deputy from the PD and the incumbent Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, as the prime minister.
The 2018 general election resulted in a hung parliament. As a result of the ensuing government formation talks, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (Lega) formed a new cabinet led Giuseppe Conte, a law professor close to the M5S. During the government formation, Mattarella's role became particularly important when he refused to appoint the Eurosceptic economist Paolo Savona as minister of finance.
In August 2019, Lega's leader Matteo Salvini announced a motion of no confidence against Conte after growing tensions within the majority. Many political analysts believed that the no confidence motion was an attempt to force early elections and to improve Lega's standing in the parliament, so that Salvini could become the next prime minister. On 21 August, Mattarella started the consultations with all the parliamentary groups. On the same day, the national direction of the PD officially opened to form a new cabinet in a coalition with the M5S. On 29 August, Mattarella summoned Conte to the Quirinal Palace to give him the task of forming the new cabinet.
In 2020, Italy became one of the countries worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conte's government was the first in the Western world to implement a national pandemic lockdown to stop the spread of the disease. Despite being widely approved by public opinion, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Italy was also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the Italian Republic. Mattarella described the COVID-19 crisis as "three emergencies on the health, social and economic fronts" that needed a stable government and made sure a new government could be formed after the Conte II Cabinet fell, amid high popularity, with the possibility of a second term.
In January 2021, Renzi's Italia Viva (IV), a member of the coalition supporting Conte's cabinet, withdrew its support for the government. Although Conte won confidence votes in the parliament in the subsequent days, he chose to resign, having failed to reach an absolute majority in the Senate of the Republic. After negotiations to form a third Conte cabinet failed, President Mattarella appointed Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, as the prime minister at the head of a national unity government composed of independent technocrats and politicians from M5S, Lega, PD, IV, Forza Italia (FI), and Free and Equal (LeU).
Race for the presidency (2021–2022)
During 2021, President Mattarella expressed his unavailability regarding a second a final term, which had been proposed by various political forces, recalling similar remarks made by his predecessors Antonio Segni and Giovanni Leone. Other political figures stated that they did not intend to run as president, among them Romano Prodi, Emma Bonino, and Liliana Segre.
During a press conference in Rome on 22 December 2021, Prime Minister Draghi, questioned on the hypothesis of his rise to the Quirinal Palace, declared that he was "a grandfather in the service of institutions". The declaration was interpreted as a confirmation of his willingness to be elected president and accelerated the debate around the consequences of a possible election to the presidency of the incumbent prime minister, something that had never happened before. Several national and foreign observers considered Draghi to be a probable candidate for the presidency, among them the Corriere della Sera, The Economist, Le Figaro, the Financial Times, Le Monde, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and The New York Times.
On 14 January 2022, the leaders of the centre-right coalition expressed their willingness to nominate former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi as their candidate to the presidency. Berlusconi's candidacy was widely criticised by PD, M5S, and other centrist and leftist parties. PD secretary Enrico Letta described it as "divisive", stating that Italy needed a unitary president and not a long-time party leader like Berlusconi. On 22 January, after acknowledging that he did not have enough votes to be elected, Berlusconi announced the withdrawal of his candidacy.
On 16 January, forty parliamentarians in opposition to the Draghi government and belonging to the Mixed Group factions of Alternativa, Communist Party (PC), and Power to the People (PaP), supported the candidacy of the former vice-president of the Constitutional Court of Italy Paolo Maddalena, subsequently obtaining the support of Italexit, Italy of Values (IdV), and the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), the latter of which was not represented in the assembly. Before the start of the voting process, PaP withdrew its support for Maddalena due to his positions against abortion and same-sex marriage. A similar choice was also expressed within the Mixed Group by Green Italia's parliamentary group FacciamoEco, which decided to vote for Marco Cappato, an activist and member of the Italian Radicals.
Various hypothetical candidacies were proposed by media, journalists and political analysts in the days before the election. The list notably included Elisabetta Casellati, who is serving as the president of the Senate, former president of the Senate Marcello Pera, former presidents of the Chamber of Deputies like Pier Ferdinando Casini and Luciano Violante, the European Commissioner and former prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, the judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy and former prime minister Giuliano Amato, former ministers like Franco Frattini, Giulio Tremonti, Andrea Riccardi, Rosy Bindi, and Paola Severino, the judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy Silvana Sciarra, and the diplomat Elisabetta Belloni. David Sassoli, President of the European Parliament, was also a potential candidate for the PD until his death on 11 January 2022.
On 24 January, the day of the first ballot, in the absence of a common candidate, both centre-right and centre-left coalitions requested the blank vote. On the other hand, the candidacies of Maddalena and Cappato were voted by minor parties and parliamentary groups, while Action and More Europe confirmed their support to the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia. On the same day, Giorgia Meloni, leader of Brothers of Italy (FdI), proposed former deputy attorney of Venice Carlo Nordio. Nordio rejected the candidacy, citing lack of political experience.
On 25 January, the leaders of the centre-right coalition organized a press conference to announce a list of presidential candidates. The candidates were Marcello Pera, former president of the Senate, Letizia Moratti, a former mayor of Milan who previously rejected the candidacy in favor of Berlusconi, and Nordio, the former magistrate who also had already rejected the candidacy. Letta described the three candidacies as "a step forward, useful for dialogue"; however, he said that he did not believe that these candidacies could be considered as shared among the political sides. Also in the second round, both the centre-right and centre-left coalitions decided to vote blank.
On 26 January, Meloni officially proposed her own party's co-founder Guido Crosetto as candidate in the third ballot, while members of For the Autonomies, a minor group of regionalist parties, announced their votes for Casini. Despite the two coalitions still deciding to vote blank, incumbent president Mattarella resulted as the most voted candidate with 125 votes, even though no parties proposed him as candidate and he had always ruled out a second term. Mattarella was followed by Crosetto with 114, Maddalena with 61, and Casini with 52.
On 27 January, contrasts between the two major coalitions prevented the proposal of a shared candidacy. On the fourth ballot, the centre-right coalition decided to abstain, while the centre-left one voted blank. Alternativa and other minor opposition parties voted for Nino Di Matteo, an anti-mafia prosecutor and member of the High Council of the Judiciary. Once again, President Mattarella resulted as the most voted candidate, gaining 166 votes, followed by Di Matteo with 56 votes.
On 28 January, the centre-right coalition officially proposed Casellati as its candidate for the presidency in the fifth ballot. Casellati, President of the Senate and member of FI, was strongly supported by the League's leader Matteo Salvini, who stated that it was a "true honor to propose her as the first female president". The centre-left coalition opposed her candidacy and decided to abstain. Casellati gained a mere result of 382 votes, far below the majority threshold of 505 required to be elected and even below the number of centre-right electors, due to more than 70 so-called "free snipers" (Italian: franchi tiratori). Casellati was followed by Mattarella with 46 votes and Di Matteo with 38. In the sixth ballot on the evening of 28 January, the centre-right abstained, while the centre-left formally voted blank. Once again, President Mattarella resulted as the most voted candidate with 336 votes, despite any party formally supporting his re-election, as well as his firm denial to a second term.
On the evening of 28 January, Salvini announced his willingness to propose a female candidate as president. Salvini's statement was soon followed by a remark of Giuseppe Conte, president of the M5S, opening to a possibile agreement between Lega and M5S on the candidacy of Elisabetta Belloni, a diplomat and director of the Department of Information for Security. This possibility was later confirmed with a tweet by M5S founder Beppe Grillo, who wrote: "Welcome Madame Italy, Elisabetta Belloni." Belloni's candidacy was immediately opposed by former prime minister and IV leader Matteo Renzi, who stated that the serving head of national intelligence could not be elected president, while the foreign affairs minister Luigi Di Maio described the manner Belloni was proposed as "indecorous". The candidacy was also attacked by Coraggio Italia (CI), FI, LeU, and by various factions of the PD and M5S.
On the morning of 29 January, the seventh ballot was inconclusive, as Lega and FI abstained, the centre-left voted blank, and FdI supported Nordio. Mattarella was again the most voted candidate with 387 votes, followed by Nordio with 64, and Di Matteo with 40. During the seventh ballot, after the fall of all other possible candidacies, the re-election of incumbent president Mattarella became a serious alternative. Letta, who had already proposed his re-election a few weeks before, asked the other leaders to follow "the Parliament's wisdom", referring to the massive support that Mattarella had received in the previous ballots.
Accusing the centre-left of having rejected all his proposals, Salvini opened to a new term for the incumbent president. Salvini's proposal for a new term met the criticism of Meloni, who stated in a tweet that she did not "want to believe it". Casini, who was widely considered one of the most reliable candidates, asked to rule out his name and vote for Mattarella. Prime Minister Draghi, another probable candidate, asked Mattarella to accept a second term for "the good and the stability of the country". In the early afternoon, the delegations of parliamentary groups of PD, M5S, Lega, FI, IV, CI, LeU, and For the Autonomies went to the Quirinal Palace asking Mattarella to concede his availability to a second term. Mattarella agreed to get re-elected.