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The context of European parties has been through a process of significant transformation in recent years, with the fall of traditional mainstream parties and the rise of challenger parties. Despite their significant differences, mainly at the ideological level, we argue that challenger parties share some common characteristics when they first enter parliament. Namely, we expect them to employ a similar strategy as regards their relationship with the other party actors and to attempt to send the same message to their electorate: that they represent the alternative to existing parties, be it in government or in opposition, and will behave accordingly in parliament. We test our expectations by analysing and comparing the cooperation attitudes of challenger parties vis-à-vis the other opposition parties, using legislative co-sponsorship during their first term in parliament as an indicator and Social Network Analysis as a method.

In 2017, the parties of the centre-right camp – Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Matteo Salvini’s (Northern) League and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia – faced the puzzle of deciding whether to participate in the imminent general elections as allies or as rivals. On the one hand they had partially different aims (especially in relation to the European Union issue) and the problem of choosing the leadership of the alliance; on the other, the new electoral system, partially based on single-member districts, forced them to present common candidates in order to maximize their chances of reaching a majority of seats in parliament. In this article, we outline the stages through which the centre-right parties attempted to solve this puzzle over the course of the year, finally reaching an agreement to make a formal electoral alliance. In the final section of the article, we focus on one additional political actor of the right wing: the neo-fascist movements, notably Forza Nuova and CasaPound, which received significant media coverage during 2017. We describe how these movements were able to gain center stage and what this implied for the mainstream centre-right parties.

The 2013 general election saw the fall of both the mainstream parties which had alternated in government until then – the Democratic Party (PD – Partito Democratico) and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PDL – Popolo delle Libertà) – and the emergence of a new strong third political force, namely the Five Star Movement (M5S). This result challenged the new bipolar structure that Italy had acquired and, because of the absence of a majority in the Senate, generated a major political crisis which eventually led to the creation of a grand coalition composed of two former political competitors from the centre left and the centre right. The tripolar structure of party competition that came unexpectedly1 out from the 2013 election was confi rmed by the 2018 election together with an even stronger success of the Five Star Movement, which obtained alone more than 32 percent of votes in both chambers. These political events are not dissimilar from what happened in many other European democracies in recent times – crisis of the governing parties, success of new political actors, restructuring of the party system – and brought about a crucial question that we intend to address in the present chapter: can we speak of the launch of a third new phase in the Italian party system following the 2013 and, more recently, the 2018 elections? And what are the main causes of such changes?