The centre-right - Italy's biggest parliamentary bloc - is ready to govern "tomorrow morning", its leader Matteo Salvini said on Monday after its candidate triumphed in polls in the southern Molise region.
"We are ready to take office tomorrow morning to tackle the two emergencies the country is facing - work and security," Salvini told a rally in the northeast town of Tolmezzo on Monday.
Salvini heads the far-right League party, which along with the populist Five-Star Movement made the strongest gains in Italy's inconclusive national election last month that led to a hung parliament.
"We will do our utmost in the coming hours," Salvini said ahead of Italian head of state Sergio Mattarella's expected announcement on Monday on his planned way forward out of the political stalemate.
Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, who leads Five-Star - now the largest parliamentary party - have both claimed first bid to try and form a government. Salvini says he is open to a centre-right-Five-Star government while Di Maio is wooing the League party and the centre-left Democratic Party, whose electoral coalition came third in the 4 March vote.
Di Maio refuses to govern with Salvini's ally, the conservative Forza Italia party of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, who has has a tax fraud conviction and is on trial for bribery, while Berlusconi has also rejected a coalition with Five-Star, who he said last week were only fit "to clean toilets".
Di Maio on Monday unveiled a proposed 10-point 'contract' for a coalition government with the League or the Democratic Party.
The blueprint includes fighting poverty and joblessness, reducing regional economic imbalances, boosting security, reform of the judiciary the public health service and taxation, and measures to help businesses, protect the environment and streamline Italy's creaking bureaucracy and to cut waste.
According to Di Maio there is "significant common ground" between the three parties on reforming taxation and improving infrastructure as well on as the ways to achieve these goals.
