Centre-left coalition (Italy)

The centre-left coalition (Italian: coalizione di centro-sinistra) is a political alliance of political parties in Italy active under several forms and names since 1995, when The Olive Tree was formed under the leadership of Romano Prodi. The centre-left coalition has ruled the country for more than fifteen years between 1996 and 2022; to do so, it had mostly to rely on a big tent that went from the more radical left-wing, which had more weight between 1996 and 2008, to the political centre, which had more weight during the 2010s, and its main parties were also part of grand coalitions and national unity governments.

The coalition mostly competed with the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1996 Italian general election, The Olive Tree consisted of the majority of both the left-wing Alliance of Progressives and the centrist Pact for Italy, the two losing coalitions in the 1994 Italian general election, the first under a system based primarily on first-past-the-post voting. In 2005, The Union was founded as a wider coalition to contest the 2006 Italian general election, which later collapsed due to Clemente Mastella during the 2008 Italian political crisis, with the fall of the second Prodi government.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the centre-left coalition has been built around the Democratic Party (PD), which was established in 2007 from a merger of Democrats of the Left and Democracy is Freedom, the main parties affiliated to both The Olive Tree and The Union. The centre-left coalition was part of Italian governments from November 2011 to June 2018, when a coalition government between the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League was formed.

In September 2019, the centre-left returned to power in coalition with the M5S, with centre-left parties participating in the national unity government of Mario Draghi, who was the country's prime minister from February 2021 until the 2022 Italian government crisis in July that led to the 2022 Italian general election. Under an electoral law (Rosatellum) that favoured unity and coalitions, a divided centre-left, M5S, and PD's centrist split parties suffered a loss to the centre-right coalition, which won a majority of seats since the 2008 Italian general election. Since 2023, PD, M5S, AVS and minor leftist parties often run within the same coalition at local and regional level in the Progressive Camp.^[1][2]