Show Me What You Challenge, and I’ll Write Where We Are Going: The Italian Party System Under Siege by Challenger Parties

European party systems have been shaken by the growing emergence of new actors, which challenge those parties occupying a core position within their national party systems. However, the feature of newness represents just a part of the story. In parallel, ostracized political parties – that are all but not new – abruptly enlarged their previous electoral niche. Challenger parties are those actors struggling to alter the main dimensions of the political competition within their national party system; whereas, core parties are conceptualized as the ones fighting to preserve intact the existing lines of political conflict. The responses – and the patterns of interactions – displayed by the core parties in contrasting the rise of the challengers strongly differed across Europe. Within the context of 2013 and 2018 Italian general elections, this paper aims to show how the differential reactions provided by the Italian core parties to challengers’ success shaped the transformation of the party system, which shifted from the quasi-two-party system, marking the 2008 election, to the actual tripolar pattern of competition. Through an analysis of party manifestos, the current contribution proposes a challenger typology, in order to assess if the type of challenger determines the patterns of the challenger/core parties’ interactions, enlightening the broader process of party system change in Italy.