Centre-right coalition (Italy)
[5][6] It is composed of right-leaning parties in the Italian political arena, which generally advocate tax reduction and oppose immigration, and in some cases are eurosceptic.
[8][9] In the 1996 Italian general election, after the Northern League had left in late 1994, the centre-right coalition took the name of Pole for Freedoms.
In 2018, the renamed and rebranded League formed a coalition government with the Five Star Movement and without its centre-right allies, which entered the opposition.
[11][12] This internal crisis further intensified when Forza Italia and the League joined the national unity government of Mario Draghi, while Brothers of Italy remained at the opposition.
In 1994, the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who was previously close to the former Italian Socialist Party (PSI) secretary and former prime minister Bettino Craxi and appeared in commercials for the PSI, was studying the possibility of making a political party of his own to avoid what seemed to be the unavoidable victory of the Alliance of Progressives led by Achille Occhetto at the next general election.
In 1996, it was officially named Pole for Freedoms and debuted in the 1996 Italian general election, where it was defeated by the centre-left coalition alliance The Olive Tree, whose leader was Romano Prodi.
In the run-up of the 2001 Italian general election, after a six-year spell in opposition, which Berlusconi called "the crossing of the desert", he managed to re-unite the coalition under the House of Freedoms banner.
In government, Forza Italia, whose strongholds included Lombardy in Northern Italy and Sicily in Southern Italy, and the Northern League, which was active only in the Centre-North, formed the "axis of the North" through the special relationship between three Lombards leaders, Berlusconi, Bossi, and Giulio Tremonti; on the other side of the coalition, the National Alliance and the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats, the party emerged from the merger of the Christian Democratic Centre and United Christian Democrats in late 2002, became the natural representatives of Southern interests.
The defeat was particularly damaging in the South, while the only two regions that the coalition managed to keep, Lombardy and Veneto, were in the North, where the Northern League was decisive.
In the 2006 Italian general election, the House of Freedoms, which had opened its ranks to a number of minor parties, lost to The Union, a larger, successor version of The Olive Tree.
After Berlusconi's resignation during the European debt crisis, the People of Freedom supported Mario Monti's technocratic government in 2011–2012.
After the 2013 Italian general election, it became part of Enrico Letta's government of grand coalition with the Democratic Party, Civic Choice, and the Union of the Centre.
[20][21] On 16 November 2013, the People of Freedom's national council voted to dissolve itself and start a new Forza Italia; the assembly was deserted by a group of dissidents, led by Alfano, who had launched the alternative New Centre-Right party the day before.
In the 2022 Italian general election, the centre-right obtained a majority in both houses, with Brothers of Italy as the largest party of the coalition.
In the 2001 Italian general election, the House of Freedoms was composed of seven parties: The coalition presented a candidate a member of the Sardinian Reformers in Sardinia.
Berlusconi launched The People of Freedom in late 2007; this was joined by FI, AN and minor parties,[28] and continued its alliance with the LN.
