Italy's National Future party said on Saturday it had doubled its number of members of parliament to eight, after four switched alliances ahead of general elections set for 2027.
"Whilst some people wrote us off as a flash in the pan, National Future continues to grow," the party said on social media.
READ ALSO: Italy's far-right National Future party doubles its MPs
National Future was set up in February by Roberto Vannacci, a far-right figure now challenging the government's coalition parties after a split with Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s League.
A member of European parliament since 2024 and a former army general, Vannacci was brought into the League by Salvini in hopes he could help regain ground with voters lost to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.
Instead, Vannacci helped collapse support for the League in Tuscany’s regional elections from 22 percent to four, before leaving the party in early 2026 after a split with senior members.
Vannacci is best known for his 2023 book Il mondo al contrario ('The World Upside Down'), in which he denounced the "dictatorship of minorities" and said gay people were "not normal."
Last year, Vannacci was in the news for arguing that the March on Rome wasn't a coup, Mussolini was democratically elected, and fascism operated legally until the mid-1930s - claims which Jewish groups called "blatant historical revisionism”.
His radical rhetoric may now further split the far-right vote in Italy, potentially complicating Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's hopes of easy re-election.
The party sits in a long European line of nationalist outfits trading on the same initials, from the French Front National to the British National Front.
For now, eight deputies is however not enough to form a parliamentary group - 20 are required - so they sit within the mixed group in the lower house.
Opinion polls this week put the new National Future at around 4.5 percent support, most of it taken from the anti-immigrant League party.
Meloni's party remains the most popular, polling at around 28 percent support, but FN's support has been steadily growing, and it is looking to close the gap with the League, which is polling at around 6 percent support.
Giovanni Orsina, political scientist at Rome's Luiss University, told AFP he did not expect FN to win more than 3 or 4 percent at the election, but even that "could decide the victory or defeat of the right-wing coalition".
Two of FN's new members of parliament came from the League, the other two from the centre-right Forza Italia party founded by Silvio Berlusconi.
The shift in alliance was not unexpected ahead of the vote, as members of parliament gamble on which party gives them "the best chance" of re-election, Orsina said.
"In the end, these are personal political survival strategies, I wouldn't attach too much political value to them," he said.
"Salvini created Vannacci, it was a Salvini error," Orsina said.
Vannacci is targeting voters disenchanted with Salvini, as well as Meloni, who has radical far-right roots but has softened her rhetoric and taken a more pragmatic approach since taking office.
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