The favourite to win is an ex-Communist from the centre left, Pier Luigi Bersani.
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The centre left National Congress for New Politics came second and the Conservative United Liberal Democrats came third.
The official German defence has three parts, broadly, and it unites the centre left and centre right wings of the coalition government.
The Golden Age for the centre left in the European Parliament was the 1990s when Europe had double digit unemployment and a nasty recession.
We are a centre left political party who believes in certain values - social justice, community, opportunity for all, but we're realising those in today's world.
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Mr Gauck, a non-partisan civil rights campaigner put forward by the centre left, appeared close to tears as his supporters applauded his result in the third ballot, which needed a simple majority.
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He argues that the centre left should not copy the right, because limiting immigration is not a simple task over the long term, and because limiting welfare payments for foreigners tends to end up in court challenges.
And signalling his intention to fight on the Blairite centre ground he said that with the Lib Dems in coalition with the Tories he believed Labour can be a "great unifying force on all shades of centre left opinion in this country".
In return, he bowed to a plan stitched up between pan-European socialists and the European People's Party, the main conservative block in the EU, to give the council presidency to someone from the centre right and the foreign-policy job to the centre left.
MEPs from centre-left, centre-right and the centre reliably favour action at the European level, a bigger EU budget, more public spending, more EU regulation and generally grabbing power from national governments and the commission.
The 18 September elections left neither the centre-left SPD nor the conservative CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, with a majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.
The resonance of such tactics may embarrass French and German politicians, both on the centre-left and the centre-right, who have predicted that Muslims will soon be integrated as their fellow citizens get used to them, and as their ties with homelands like Turkey and Morocco weaken.
Either in fear or in hope, many Greeks detect a breakdown of a political system, over a century old, in which two political groups (notionally of the centre-left and the centre-right, but both given to patronage and graft) progressively exhaust the national exchequer by outbidding each other.
Those centre and left-of-centre parties which want to start talking about a two-state deal seem destined to end up in opposition again.
Both the centre-left Labour party and the centre-right VVD party won a sufficient number of votes between themselves to rule with a majority in the lower houses of parliament.
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In the 1990s, at the insistence of Massimo D'Alema, leader of the biggest left-wing party, the centre-left government held off passing laws to break Mr Berlusconi's virtual monopoly on private television.
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But he has left behind a right old mess on the centre-left of politics back home in Italy.
The president left Greece for a meeting in Florence with centre-left politicians from around the world, including Germany, the UK and France.
The other party sitting pretty is the Christian Democrats, led by Josef Lux, who has every reason to believe that he will be as indispensable to a centre-left coalition as he was to the outgoing centre-right one.
Polls consistently give the centre-left a 4-5% lead over the centre-right.
If you ask Massimo D'Alema, leader of the ex-communist Democratic Party of the Left, the cornerstone of Romano Prodi's ruling centre-left coalition, he will tell you that Mr Fini's rapidly changing political garmentry is not just a guise for opportunism.
The trouble is that few Socialist voices are left to press for the reinvention of the party as a centre-left movement like others in Europe.
His foreign circle ranges from Peter Mandelson, confidant of Tony Blair, the British centre-left prime minister, to Joachim Bitterlich, former adviser on Europe to the centre-right Helmut Kohl.
In local elections in Italy , candidates of parties in the ruling centre-left coalition did badly, while those of small, revamped Christian Democratic parties of the centre did well.
No less predictably, the left-wing press, notably La Repubblica, a Rome daily which backs the ruling centre-left coalition and is owned partly by one of Mr Berlusconi's bitterest business and political rivals, Carlo De Benedetti, was full of praise.
Exit polls suggest the centre-left has won a lower house majority, while early count data gave Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right the lead in the Senate.
In 2002 the then centre-left government said it would phase out nuclear power by 2022.
So Mr Hollande, a fellow member of the centre-left may come as a welcome change.
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