La Lega or the League Party of Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is set to win 27 seats in May’s European elections, according to new set of projections released by the European Parliament on Friday.
This would confirm Lega’s position as the European party with the second-most MEPs after Germany’s CSU/CDU with 33.
   Lega won six seats in the 2014 European elections and was forecast to get 28 this time around in the previous set of projections, released on March 1.
   The League’s government coalition partner, the 5-Star Movement (M5S), is set to win 18 seats, down by three on the previous projection but up from 14 in 2014.
   The centre-right Democratic Party is also set to win 18, according to the new projections, up from the 14 forecast on March 1 but down from 31 it won five years ago. Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia is projected to have nine MEPs.
In the meantime the European Parliament said it would stop publishing polling data one month before the EU election in May, due to concerns over national election legislation and complaints by parliamentary groups.
In a meeting this week, the Parliament’s 14 vice presidents and five treasurers responsible for internal procedures, decided to reduce the planned publication of seven polls to two, one of which was released today Friday. No new data will be made public in the last month before the election.
The initiative to publish the polls caused outrage among many MEPs who argued that the Parliament, as a neutral institution, was not entitled to publish its own polls and projection of seats.
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