The anti-establishment Five-Star Movement will not hook up with Italy's far-right League or with France's National Rally party if a planned new centrist group fails to enter the European Parliament in May, well-placed party sources told Adnkronos on Tuesday.
"On the subject of European alliances, Luigi Di Maio's words to Italy and to Five-Star are clear," the sources said.
"There is and will not be a plan B," the sources underlined.
The Five-Star Movement, which governs Italy in coalition with the League party led by Matteo Salvini, is currently "hammering out a blueprint to change Europe," the sources went on.
"We will then present this programme to all political forces that want to work for citizens, not against them," the sources added.
"We are an alternative political force to those of the system (the European People's Party and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) and to the various European sovereignist and ultrantionalist parties," the sources said.
The comments came after Five-Star member Euro-MP Marco Valli ruffled feathers in Rome and Brussels by telling Italian daily La Stampa that should such a new centrist force flop "we would ally with Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen."