The paper presents a study of the party positions in the Italian Parliament based on an
inductive approach to the parliamentary debate and investiture votes of the government
led by G. Meloni (2022-). Through a content analysis of the parliamentary debate on the
investiture votes, a survey is provided of political themes tackled by G. Meloni and by the
main Italian parliamentary groups. The scope of the research is to assess the alignments
of the Italian parties after the decline of the traditional left-to-right cleavage and the
rise of the populist trend. The multidimensional character of the space of competition is
highlighted and, through a comparison with the policy content of the investiture debates
of governments led by S. Berlusconi (1994-2005) and recently G. Conte (2018-2020), the
paper tackles the controversy of whether populist parties are “valence” or “positional”.
Populist parties in Italy do take policy positions when they are called to assume executive
accountability and the differences between the two moods emerge as a particular declension of the political discourse in an era of the demise of politics.
