Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has announced his resignation, propelling Italy into a political crisis that might only be resolved by a snap election that would distract the government from trying to end a pandemic that has killed 86,000 Italians.
Mr. Conte, a compromise leader who has been guiding a fragile and awkward coalition government since mid-2018, will present his resignation to President Sergio Mattarella early on Tuesday and ask to be given a chance to form a new coalition. Mr. Conte is stepping down ahead of a Senate vote on a judicial report that was set to hand him a humiliating defeat.
His exodus will bring down the 66th Italian government since the end of the Second World War. While Italians are used to revolving-door governments, the fresh political instability could not come at worse time.
Measured by total deaths, Italy’s pandemic is the second worst in Europe, after Britain, and sixth worse in the world. By number of cases – 2.5 million – its pandemic is the fourth worst in Europe.
The country is also the most indebted country in Europe and mired in a deep recession that has destroyed thousands of businesses and sent youth unemployment to almost 30 per cent. Italy was also in the middle of finalizing plans to spend about €200-billion ($309.5-billion) in economic recovery funds handed out by the European Union.
The collapse of the coalition in the EU’s third-largest economy also shows political fragmentation is alive and well in Europe even though fixing the pandemic has garnered cross-political support in other European countries. Mr. Conte’s coalition has been ridden with infighting from the start and probably would have fallen last year were it not for the pandemic emergency, which hit Italy in late February and triggered the world’s longest and tightest national lockdown in early March.
Mr. Conte’s resignation comes only a week after his government, made up largely of the centre-left Democratic Party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, lost its absolute majority in the Senate. The blow came after the defection of Italy Alive, a small coalition party led by Matteo Renzi, a former Democratic Party prime minister with no love for Mr. Conte. Mr. Renzi disapproved of Mr. Conte’s handling of the pandemic and the government’s spending plans for the EU recovery funds.
Based on experience, it is almost certain Mr. Mattarella will give Mr. Conte a shot at forming a new government. But Mr. Conte’s gambit may not succeed, even though he still has the support of the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement. He will have to win over some of the small centrist parties to create a new coalition with staying power.
Francesco Galietti, chief executive officer of Policy Sonar, a Rome political risk consultancy, said there are several options if Mr. Conte comes up short. He will likely be given a week or two to form a new government.
“If he fails, the President could appoint another prime minister to try to form a government, probably under a leader from the Democrats or the Five Stars,” Mr. Galietti said. “Failing that, there could be a technocrat government.”
A technocrat government would be an interim government charged with stabilizing Italy politically while it fights the pandemic. Italy formed a technocrat government of unelected officials in 2011, after the effective ouster of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister. At the time, Italy was buried in a financial and debt crisis that threatened to tear the euro zone apart.
Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank who enjoys wide respect in Brussels and among EU governments, has been mentioned as a possible leader of a technocrat government.
Still another option is a snap election that could only be called by the President. While there is little public appetite among the electorate or most political parties to go to the polls, an election would be welcomed by Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right, anti-migrant League Party.
On Monday night, Mr. Salvini, whose party remains the most popular, used a Twitter video to demand that Italy “uses the next weeks to give the [vote] back to the people, and then, for five years, we will have a government and a parliament that is serious and legitimate.”
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