2006 Italian general election in the context of Romano Prodi

The Democratic Party (Italian: Partito Democratico, PD) is a social democratic political party in Italy. The party's secretary is Elly Schlein, elected in the 2023 leadership election, while the party's president is Stefano Bonaccini.

The PD was established in 2007 upon the merger of various centre-left parties which had been part of The Olive Tree list in the 2006 Italian general election, mainly the social democratic Democrats of the Left (DS), successor of the Italian Communist Party and the Democratic Party of the Left, which was folded with several social democratic parties (Labour Federation and Social Christians, among others) in 1998, as well as the largely Catholic-inspired Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy (DL), a merger of the Italian People's Party (heir of the Christian Democracy party's left wing), The Democrats and Italian Renewal in 2002. While the party has also been influenced by Christian left, social liberalism and Third Way, especially under Matteo Renzi's leadership, the PD moved closer to social liberalism. Under latter leaders, especially Schlein, whose upbringing is influenced by the left-wing, environmentalism and green politics, the party has moved to the left.

The centre-left coalition (Italian: coalizione di centro-sinistra) is a political alliance of political parties in Italy active under several forms and names since 1995, when The Olive Tree was formed under the leadership of Romano Prodi. The centre-left coalition has ruled the country for more than thirteen years between 1996 and 2021; to do so, it had mostly to rely on a big tent that went from the more radical left-wing, which had more weight between 1996 and 2008, to the political centre, which had more weight during the 2010s, and its main parties were also part of grand coalitions and national unity governments.

The coalition mostly competed with the centre-right coalition founded by Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1996 Italian general election, The Olive Tree consisted of the majority of both the left-wing Alliance of Progressives and the centrist Pact for Italy, the two losing coalitions in the 1994 Italian general election, the first under a system based primarily on first-past-the-post voting. In 2005, The Union was founded as a wider coalition to contest the 2006 Italian general election, which later collapsed due to Clemente Mastella during the 2008 Italian political crisis, with the fall of the second Prodi government.

The Olive Tree (Italian: L'Ulivo) was a denomination used for several successive centre-left political and electoral alliances of Italian political parties from 1995 to 2007.

The historical leader and ideologue of these coalitions was Romano Prodi, Professor of Economics and former leftist Christian Democrat, who invented the name and the symbol of The Olive Tree with Arturo Parisi in 1995. For the 2006 general election The Olive Tree was largely supplanted by a wider Prodi-led alliance called The Union, while The Olive Tree remained a smaller federation of parties which merged to form the Democratic Party in October 2007, which continues to be the lead party of an unnamed centre-left coalition.