(ANALYSIS) While Pope Francis has spent this week in Canada on an apology tour making amends for past injustices the church committed against Indigenous peoples, the situation back home in Italy hasn’t been great.

The country — in the midst of massive inflation, a heat wave, wildfires and rising COVID-19 numbers — added political crisis to that long list of problems this summer. Italy’s government collapsed after Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned, a move that triggered snap national elections scheduled for Sept. 25.

Draghi, an economist and Italy’s fifth prime minister in just eight years, had been in charge for only 18 months after a previous months-long political crisis saw Giuseppe Conte’s left-wing parliamentary coalition collapse.

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Pope Francis, along with the European Union and Italy’s left-wing voters, face a major headache since a coalition of right-wing parties could emerge victorious. Italy's center-right is led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia, Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigration party known as the League, and Giorgia Meloni of Brothers of Italy. All three parties have been at odds with the Vatican over several issues, above all immigration, meaning that the next eight weeks could get testy.

This pope has been openly anti-populist, but the Italian people seem open to it now that the situation has gotten more dire. With two months to go before Italians go to the ballot box, it remains to been seen how involved Francis will get. The pope has been good about staying away from the morass of Italian politics, leaving it to his bishops to exert influence and make public statements.

As Vatican observer John Allen Jr. pointed out, the man who could become a political focal point this summer is 66-year-old Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, the new president of the Italian bishops conference who is widely seen as a possible successor to Francis. Since Zuppi, who was elected in May, is such a close ally of this pope, whatever he does could have some impact in Italy and beyond. Allen wrote the following in Crux:

Italian polls currently suggest the most likely outcome in September is a victory for a center-right coalition, which would not be a dream scenario for the Pope Francis agenda. Among other things, the Italian right likely would move to significantly tighten immigration policies, which could set the stage for significant church/state battles. One center-right leader recently vowed that if they prevail in September, there will be “zero illegal immigration” in Italy.”

Allen called Zuppi “the conscience of the nation” and said the outcome of the election is “a deeply interesting Catholic development, no matter who ends up running Italy.”

Over the past few months, Zuppi had said positive things about Draghi’s centrist coalition. Zuppi issued a statement just last week saying the following:

In the post-war period, we’ve never experienced such a complex conjuncture due to rising inflation and inequality, public debt that’s reached enormous levels, the return of conflict between global blocs that’s absorbing enormous energies and impeding development, the climactic and environmental emergency, problems in the world of labor, and a seeming condemnation to insecurity and fluidity.

The church certainly wants to exert some influence on future policy decisions, especially as the bad economy most hurts the country’s poorest.

Who will emerge as prime minister? The center-right coalition said Wednesday the party with the most votes from within the coalition will decide who takes charge of Parliament. Polls show that Meloni, 45, is the leading contender, paving the way for what would be Italy’s first female prime minister since the country emerged from the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and became a republic in 1946.

Meloni’s party was at just 4% in the 2018 election, but has grown to 23% in recent polls. That would make it Italy’s most popular political force ahead of the center-left Democratic Party.

“The coalition will propose to the President of the Republic as premier the person indicated by the party with the most votes,” the center-right coalition said in a statement.

Writing in Commonweal, Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, said:

On the other side of the spectrum, there is no socially progressive equivalent to the populists. The Democratic Party has become a moderate, conservative pro-establishment faction, supportive of technocratic policies and lacking credibility on social and economic justice. Its progressivism is limited to life issues (abortion and euthanasia) and the LGBT platform, where the party espouses a soft secularism. Catholics among the national elites are now known mostly for their will to stay in power, having squandered the best of the Italian lay Catholic political legacy. Indeed, Italy is split not so much by right and left as by populist and pro-establishment, and it’s the populists who look far stronger today.”

When it comes to Zuppi, Faggioli noted:

Last May, Francis’s appointment of Zuppi as leader of the bishops’ conference — after the pope ‘oriented’ the vote of the episcopate on a short list of names — damaged the relationship between Francis and the bishops, many of whom believed they were free to elect a new president but in fact felt pressured to vote for the candidate he wanted. None of this has helped the political credibility of the church in its attempt to promote Catholic ‘popularism’ as an antidote to populism. Francis’s ‘theology of the people’ might still work out fine in the synodal process for the church. But Italy’s populists could wipe away all that Francis is about, thanks in large part to the vote of Italian Catholics.

Meloni grew up Catholic in a working-class area near Rome. She was once president of the youth wing of the National Alliance, which can trace its roots to World War II and the Fascist Party. She then served as youth minister in Berlusconi’s government from 2008 to 2011 before founding Brothers of Italy.

Meloni has also been openly sympathetic toward Europe’s main pro-Vladimir Putin politicians, such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and France’s right-wing opposition leader Marine Le Pen.

While all eyes will be on Meloni, it will be Zuppi who tries to exert the most influence, especially behind the scenes, now and after Italians vote. Whether the country’s Catholics are listening remains another matter.

Clemente Lisi is a senior editor and regular contributor to Religion Unplugged. He is the former deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.