Roundup: Italians go to poll in local elections, testing popularity of gov't

Italians were going to the polls on Sunday to elect mayors and municipal councils in some 1,342 cities and towns across the country.

The vote involved all of Italy's five largest metropolitan areas, namely the capital Rome, Milan, Turin, Bologna, and Naples.

As such, it might prove a relevant test to assess the popularity of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's center-left government, which just recently entered its third year in office.

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time and would be closed at 11 p.m., and the voter turnout was only 17.99 percent at mid-day, according to data from the Interior Ministry.

A low level of participation in these local elections was predicted by major media and analysts, and could be a key factor influencing final results.

Some 13.4 million Italians were in fact eligible to vote on Sunday, and an estimated one third of them were still seen as "undecided" in the week prior to the ballot.

All eyes were on the five big cities, and Rome in particular, where the municipal voting's result would easily take on a more "political" sense, and reverberate at national level.

In addition, the Italian capital was considered the most challenging test for Renzi and his Democratic Party (PD).

Here, the candidate of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), 37-year-old lawyer Virginia Raggi, came out as leading all opinion polls in the campaign, clearly ahead of PD's contender Roberto Giachetti, a professional politician.

The Italian capital was paying the price for a huge corruption scandal dubbed "Mafia Capitale", which swamped several dozens of public officers, local officials and businessmen last year.

It was still without a proper local government, and in the hands of a commissioner, since former mayor Ignazio Marino was forced to resign by his own PD party in October 2015, in the wake of the scandal.

Meanwhile, the Five Star Movement has gained ground, capitalizing on the growing disaffection Roman citizens showed not just because of recent corruption scandals, but due to lasting poor administration and inefficient public services.

A victory in Rome would bolster the ambition of M5S to become Italy' s main opposition force.

On the other hand, an overall poor result of PD and its allies in these polls would send a relevant signal to the cabinet, only few month ahead of a constitutional reform referendum on which Renzi bet his political career.

All urban centers with over 15,000 inhabitants will hold a run-off between the first and the second best contenders on June 19, if no candidate would exceed 50 percent of the vote on Sunday.

That might be the case in some big cities, according to latest opinion polls in mid-May. Endit