Apulian regional election, 2010

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March 28-29, 2010

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All 76 seats to the Regional Council of Apulia

	Majority party	Minority party

Leader	Nichi Vendola	Rocco Palese
Party	Left Ecology Freedom	People of Freedom
Alliance	Centre-left coalition	Centre-right coalition
Last election	42 seats, 49.8%	28 seats, 49.2%
Seats won	46	26
Seat change	4	2
Popular vote	1,036,683	899,590
Percentage	48.7%	42.3%
Swing	0.9%	6.9%

President of Apulia before election

Nichi Vendola
Left Ecology Freedom

President of Apulia

Nichi Vendola
Left Ecology Freedom

The Apulian regional election of 2010 took place in Apulia, Italy, on 28–29 March 2010.

The outgoing President Nichi Vendola of Left Ecology Freedom (SEL) was elected for a second-consecutive term, after having won the a primary election in which he beat a Democrat and having benefited from the split of the centre-right, whose two candidates jointly won 51.0% of the vote.

Vendola's party, SEL, had a strong showing in the Region by coming third with 9.7% of the vote, after The People of Freedom (31.1%) and the Democratic Party (20.8%).

The incumbent left-wing president Nichi Vendola, who in 2005 surprisingly defeated a centrist in the centre-left primary election and then the outgoing President Raffaele Fitto, is under attack by his own coalition. Vendola, a gay communist President in a fairly conservative region, will find hard to get re-election in a time when the centre-right led by Silvio Berlusconi is ahead of the centre-left both in Apulia and the whole country. Moreover Vendola, after having left the Communist Refoundation Party in early 2009, instead of joining the Democratic Party (PD), the largest party of the centre-left, started a small outfit named Left and Freedom and launched his bid.

The Democrats acknowledge that they need a larger coalition in order to beat the centre-right and they are thus trying to convince Vendola to give up his bid and to endorse a more centrist candidate that could obtain the support of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC) and Adriana Poli Bortone's I the South movement. Michele Emiliano, Mayor of Bari and PD regional leader, has been constantly mentioned as a possible candidate who may receive the support also of the UDC. For her part Poli Bortone may be interested in the race but her right-wing upbringing (she was a member of the Italian Social Movement and of National Alliance) would undoubtedly stir the left.

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