• Referendum in Italy.Matteo Salvini: "The game is at stake. The left has made a mistake"

  • Covid-19, Italy votes a referendum and regional elections in the middle of the pandemic

Low turnout in the first elections that Italy holds after the pandemic, which are decided between this Sunday and Monday by the governments of seven regions and whether the country supports

the cut of a third of parliamentary seats

in a referendum

.

According to data from the Ministry of the Interior,

only 12.25% of citizens had exercised their right to vote

before noon

yesterday

, in the middle of the second wave of the virus.

As a result,

there were no queues and the people who came to vote did not take long to do so

, despite the protocol that required disinfecting their hands when entering the school.

The schools were opened in the typical Italian schedule: from seven in the morning to eleven at night.

Tomorrow, Monday, it will be possible to continue voting from seven to three in the afternoon,

and only from then on will the polls be known at the exit

.

Throughout the afternoon the final results will be published, which will reveal if the 46 million Italians called to the polls support the reform promoted by the Five Star Movement to

reduce the number of deputies from the current 945 to 600 in the next legislature

(400 in the Chamber of Deputies and 200 in the Senate).

The fear of Covid-19 not only gripped the voters.

Also the inspectors and the presidents of the voting centers resigned en masse throughout the country

.

The city of Milan launched an appeal on Saturday via social media to replace 100 school presidents.

Many of them were concerned that each voter, when depositing the ballot in the ballot box, has to remove his mask to identify himself correctly.

Only 1,820 voters confined to home due to the coronavirus asked to vote from a distance.

This was the case of the former head of the Italian Government Silvio Berlusconi, who was infected but was discharged from the hospital a few days ago.

In Rome, the Spallanzani hospital, a flagship center against the coronavirus,

installed an electoral college inside.

The establishment has 93 positive patients for Covid-19, of which 10 are admitted to intensive care.

On Saturday, the country registered 1,628 new cases and 24 deaths.

The Government does not hide that Italy is already in the middle of a second wave of the virus.

In two thirds of cases the contagion is transmitted within families

, from the young to the oldest, which has raised the average age of infected people in recent weeks.

For Massimo Galli, specialist in infectious diseases in Milan, the holding of these elections, postponed several times, is "crazy", reports Afp.

In addition to the national referendum for the political reform of the Chambers, six regions (more than 20 million inhabitants) elect their presidents.

In three of them,

a possible victory for the right would be a slap in the face for the government of Giuseppe Conte

, a coalition formed a year ago between the M5S and the center-left Democratic Party.

The coalition made up of the League of Matteo Salvini (far right), Brothers of Italy (FDI) of Giorgia Meloni (far right) and Forza Italia (right) of Silvio Berlusconi is united in all regions and can benefit greatly from the results as intuited in the surveys.

Although all the spotlight is on Tuscany, a left-wing bastion that may change color for the first time in five decades.

In fact, the leader of the Northern League

Matteo Salvini has focused his campaign efforts on mobilizing the vote

: "The party is at stake. The left has made an error of appreciation, it thought that it had already won and that in Tuscany people never I would look forward, "he said recently, Efe reports.

A seventh region, Valle d'Aosta, renews its regional advisers,

implicated in an investigation into mafia infiltration of the 'Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia) in the 2018 regional elections

.

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