Coalition led by Giorgia Meloni would be country’s most radical government since Mussolini.

Italians are voting in an election that is forecast to deliver the country’s most radical rightwing government since the end of the second world war, and a prime minister ready to become a model for nationalist parties across Europe.

A coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist origins, is expected by polls ahead of the vote to secure a comfortable victory in both houses of parliament while taking between 44 and 47% of the vote.

Meloni’s party is also set to scoop the biggest share of the votes within the coalition, which includes the far-right League, led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia, headed by Silvio Berlusconi, meaning she could become Italy’s first female prime minister.

Meloni has sought to send reassuring messages, but the prospect of her as prime minister is unlikely to be welcomed in Paris or Berlin.

Lars Klingbeil, the chairman of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD, said Meloni had aligned herself with “anti-democratic” figures such as Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

“Meloni has an ambition to represent a model not only for Italy, but for Europe – this is something new [for the right in Italy] compared with the past,” said Nadia Urbinati, a political theorist at New York’s Columbia University and the University of Bologna.

Mattia Diletti, a politics professor at Rome’s Sapienza University, said Meloni would win thanks to her ability to be ideological but pragmatic, something that has allowed her to pip the French far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, to the post of becoming western Europe’s model for nationalism.

Salvini has claimed sanctions were bringing Italy to its knees, although he never blocked any EU measures against Russia when in Mario Draghi’s broad coalition government, which collapsed in July.