The grassroots Five-Star movement will announce its candidate for Italian premier in September, its leader Beppe Grillo said on Monday, after his party failed to advance to run-offs in four regional capitals in local elections.
"In July, we will name our candidate for the governor of the Sicily region and in September our prime ministerial candidate, " Grillo wrote on his blog.
Regional elections are slated for 5 November in Sicily while national elections must be held by May 2017.
"On 5 November, there will be Sicilian regional elections and we will mobilise to ensure that splendid island becomes the first region to be governed by the Five Star Movement," Grillo vowed.
"After that, there will be national elections and our objective is to get into power."
Grillo played down the results of Sunday's local polls to elect 1,004 town halls representing over nine million Italians across the country that saw centre-left and centre-right candidates take the biggest share of votes and Five Star perform poorly, failing to make run-offs in Genoa, L'Aquila, Catanzaro or Palermo.
"Successes and failures form part of our history. The important thing is to never give in," Grillo wrote.
Grillo also claimed Sunday's elections showed his party was "growing - slowly but inexorably," while Italy's ruling centre-left Democratic Party was "slowly disappearing".
"Other parties, especially the Democratic Party, disguised themselves (in civic lists) and fielded candidates in around half the number of towns the Five Star movement did," Grillo wrote.
"Without these (civic lists), Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party would have struggled to return a single counsellor let alone a mayor."
The Five-Star party become Italy's second largest after winning 25 percent of parliamentary seats in Italy's 2013 national elections. It and the Democratic Party are currently Italy's most popular parties, with around 30 percent of voter support, according to opinion polls.
A total 30.6 percent of voters backed Five Star while 29.3 percent supported the Democratic Party, according to an opinion poll published on Sunday in leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
Five-Star member of parliament 30-year-old Luigi Di Maio is widely expected to be the movement's candidate for premier, while the Democratic Party in April re-elected the reformist Renzi, Italy's former prime minister, as its leader.
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