According to interior ministry figures released on Tuesday, the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party (FdI), which won Sunday’s general election, saw their votes rise almost five-fold from their results in the last election in 2018.

Votes for FdI, which surged from 4 per cent four years ago to 26 per cent this time round, rose from 1,429,550 to 7,300,628, the Viminale said.

This was a rise of almost 5.9 million voters.

The other two members of the winning coalition, the right-wing Lega and the centre-right Forza Italia, lost a total of 5.5 million voters with Lega down 3.2 million and FI down 2.3 million.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) lost around 800,000 voters while the populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) lost over six million.

The PD garnered a disappointing 19 per cent, a tad more than it did in 2018, while the M5S saw its share of the vote fall from a third to 15 percent after a string of defections. Still, the party performed much better than pre-election polls had indicated.

S&P Global Ratings has said that the new right-wing government has “difficult decisions” in store, due to the Italy’s high public debt and the expected onset of recession in Europe

The ratings agency highlighted the “limited” room for budget manoeuvre, with the debt set to be around 138 per cent at the end of the year and the deficit coming in at around 6.3 per cent.

“Despite this, we do not expect imminent budget risks in the transition to the new government,” it said.

S&P forecasted negative growth of 0.1 per cent for Italy in 2023, with GDP expected to rise by 1.5 per cent in 2024.

In other news concerning the centre-right, ex-premier and Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi has said there is no chance of the incoming government lurching towards populism.

“If I thought there was a risk of a populist turn, the government wouldn’t have taken off,” he said in Tuesday’s Corriere della Sera after achieving a better-than-expected 8 per cent of the vote.

“Actually, (if there were) we would not even be allied with the other two parties in our coalition,” he added, referring to FdI and Matteo Salvini’s right-wing Lega.