(Bloomberg) -- Italy's political map is a lot less colorful than it used to be.
Whereas in previous elections the main parties had pockets of support across the peninsula, the March 4 vote resulted in a wave of anti-establishment Five Star yellow south of Rome and in the islands, and a sea of blue for the center-right coalition in the north, led by a strong showing on the part of the anti-immigrant League.
“The South voted for the Five Star Movement and the North voted for the Lega, but both sides of the country expressed a vote of protest,” Luigi Zingales, professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School, told Bloomberg Television.
The center-left, which used to dominate the central part of the country, was reduced to a few pockets in its former strongholds and to a handful of prosperous districts in the north. Big cities like Rome and Milan were small red dots isolated from the rest of their regions.
The 2013 vote wasn't so clear cut. It was Five Star's first ever national election and it did well in Sicily and parts of the center and south, but the traditional parties still held on to some of their fiefdoms.
Things went differently this time around. Five Star won every district in Sicily, Sardinia, Puglia, and Molise, and all but one in Campania. Large swathes of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna and all of Umbria, which had voted left for generations, were won by the center-right.
“The numbers show a real revolution in Italy's electoral geography,” Roberto D'Alimonte, politics professor at Rome's Luiss University, wrote in his blog. The success of anti-establishment forces like Five Star and the League and the failure of the ruling party “is due to economic uncertainty and identity fears being experienced by large parts of the country.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net, Hayley Warren in London at hwarren21@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Alessandra Migliaccio
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