On Tuesday, 5-Star Movement (M5S) leader Giuseppe Conte criticised parties that are telling people to vote for them on the grounds that democracy will be in danger if their rivals win Sunday’s general election.

“Our democracy is not in danger and it is arrogant of some parties to present themselves as the guardians of democratic legitimacy,” ex-premier Conte, whose M5S is running independently from the big centre-right and centre-left blocs, told an ANSA Forum.

Democratic Party (PD) leader Enrico Letta has said Italian democracy will be in peril if the centre-right alliance wins the election, especially if it gains 70 per cent of the seats in parliament and is able to change the Constitution without a referendum.

But Conte also criticized Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia (FdI) party and Matteo Salvini’s Lega after the right-wing groups’ MEPs last week voted against a European Parliament motion declaring that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy.

Meloni, who is the favourite to become Italy’s next premier, with FdI leading the polls and the centre-right seeminly in store for a landslide victory, has defended that position, saying Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won elections in his country fair and square.

“She says Orban was voted in, but Putin was also voted in many times with sensational results,” Conte told the Forum.

“But that does not mean that these are not governments that put gags on press freedom and force women to hear the heartbeats of fetuses before having an abortion.”

Calogero Pisano. (Photo: ANSA)

Though Meloni is the favourite to win, FdI has nonetheless found itself surrounded by controversy this past week.

On Monday, the party suspended one of its candidates for the fast approaching September 25 general election over reports that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Calogero Pisano, who had been FdI’s coordinator in the Sicilian province of Agrigento, has been suspended from all roles within the party.

In the past he reportedly described Hitler as a “great statesman” and said he was a supporter of Russia President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday Ruth Dureghello, the president of Rome’s Jewish Community, spoke out about the case, saying “the idea that someone who hails Hitler could sit in the next parliament is unacceptable.”