The Italian parliamentary election of February 2013 is to be held in a condition of dramatic lack of orientation for the public opinion. From November 2011 the country has been led by a government made of independents and supported by the most of the political parties. The “technocrats” succeeded in office a right-wing coalition led by PM Berlusconi, and were appointed to implement reforms and austerity measures with the aim to prevent a financial collapse in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. While the three main parties formally supported the government but constantly took their distance from it, other old and new actors built their campaign on anti-system and eurosceptic topics. In this scenario, with the economic crisis weighting on the households' incomes, Italians are called to vote without a clear idea of who did right and who did wrong. We argue that, in such a blurred situation, voters rely on the two things that remained recognizable: ideological (left-right) labels and political leaders. Using data from a repeated cross-sectional survey running from March 2011 to April 2013, this study aims, first, to observe how party support changed over time according to their position in respect to the government, the general macro-economic process, and the interaction between the two. Second, using propensity to vote scores, we investigate what impact individual economic perceptions, evaluations of the government, ideology and leader sympathy had on the support for the most relevant parties, and how this changed over time. Preliminary results show that, while the political context makes it harder to evaluate parties based on economic considerations, the effect of ideological labels on party evaluations is strong and persistent.
