Leader Raffaele Lombardo Political position Centre-right | Founded August 2012 Sicilian Regional Assembly 4 / 90 | |
Ideology Regionalism
Autonomism
Christian democracy National affiliation Movement for the Autonomies | ||
The Party of Sicilians (Italian: Partito dei Siciliani, PdS) is an regionalist and Christian-democratic political party in Italy, which is the regional section of the Movement for the Autonomies (MpA) in Sicily.
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History
In the run-up of the 2012 Sicilian regional election Raffaele Lombardo, President of Sicily and MpA leader, decided not stand for re-election, but wanted to reinfornce the regionalist path traced by his party. In August 2012 it was announced that the Sicilian section of the MpA would be renamed. The newly formed PdS supported Gianfranco Micciché for President, as part of a "Sicilianist" coalition including also Micciché's Great South (GS), the Sicilian People's Movement and the local wing of Future and Freedom. Micciché won 15.4% of the vote, while the PdS obtained 9.5%.
The PdS/MpA failed to pass the electoral thresholds in the 2013 general election (the GS–MpA list received a mere 0.4% nationally in the Chamber race, while the PdS regional list for the Senate garnered just 2.2% of the vote), but, thanks to an agreement with The People of Freedom, had one deputy (Angelo Attaguile) and two senators (Antonio Scavone and Pippo Compagnone) elected. Attaguile chose to team up with Lega Nord in the "Lega Nord–Autonomies" parliamentary group, while the two senators joined the heterogeneous Great Autonomies and Freedom group. Attaguile later left the party to become secretary of Us with Salvini, sister party of Lega Nord in Southern Italy. Another split occurred in 2015 when Rino Piscitello, who had been the PdS secretary since 2013, launched Sicily Nation, which would later merge into the Sicilian National Movement.