Now, a "new" Italian government

Reach for your quotes from Il Gattopardo: things must change in order to stay the same (more or less)

So Giuseppe Conte, prime minister of two Italian governments in 2018-19 and 2019-2021, will now present his resignation to President Sergio Mattarella tomorrow…in the hope of forming a third. His first, for which he was plucked from obscurity as a law professor, was a coalition of left and right, of the Movement Cinque Stelle and of the Lega, rather as if Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had got together. His second, following the departure of Lega’s leader, Matteo Salvini, in a failed attempt to force a general election, has been a broad coalition of the centre-left, connecting Cinque Stelle, the more mainstream Partito Democratico, the breakaway Italia Viva of Matteo Renzi and another small PD splinter called Liberi e Uguali (free and equal). And his third? Well, if it happens it will most likely be a new version of the same as his second. But actually, it may not happen at all. My bet would be on the same coalition but under a new prime minister.

If it all seems fractious and confusing, that’s because it is. But that long list of parties in the current coalition, two of them breakaways from the mainstream PD, gives the clue as to where the problem lies. The centre-left is in government but it is far from unified. It lacks a leader to hold it together. In Parliament and in opinion polls there are also other centre-left splinters: a centrist party called Azione founded by a former PD minister, Carlo Calenda; a pro-European party called +Europa whose mainstay is Emma Bonino, a veteran former EU Commissioner, former foreign minister and longtime member of the Partito Radicale, clearly of the centre-left but never part of its mainstream. If you analyse today’s opinion polls, the parties of the centre-left are narrowly ahead of those of the centre-right. The difference is that the three parties of the centre-right are perfectly able to work together and run common candidates in elections. That is not true of the centre-left.

Two points follow from that observation. The first is that in current circumstances if early elections were to be held (they are not scheduled until 2023), the centre-right would win a majority under the existing electoral law because it would collaborate. The centre-left has proven in many recent regional elections that it is not able or willing to do that. So the centre-left would be foolish to entertain the idea of early elections. The second observation is that to hold the centre-left more or less together in a coalition government, they need a prime minister who none of them may really like but who all can tolerate. The question is whether that person remains the hitherto obscure law professor, Giuseppe Conte.

Mr Conte’s hope is that he does remain that person. He has maintained high approval ratings in opinion polls throughout the pandemic. Polls suggest that if he were to form his own political party he might command 10% or more of the vote. If he were to be elected leader of Cinque Stelle that party would perform a lot better than its current 15% of the vote. Yet those are all reasons that make him disliked by the other members of the coalition. His problem is that while he has a good standing with the public, recent votes show that he is not strong enough in Parliament. On January 13th he won the confidence vote in the Senate with a narrow majority only because Mr Renzi’s party abstained. Mr Conte stood to lose a vote this week on a justice reform dear to the hearts of Cinque Stelle, which is why he has chosen to resign instead, as a tactical retreat. He has so far failed to win over sufficient of the fairly unattached senators to make his government stable. A few days ago a further blow came when the leader of a small centrist party, the UDC, was implicated in a big case involving the powerful Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, and had to resign: the UDC was a candidate group to be recruited by Mr Conte, and would now be anathema to Cinque Stelle.

In truth, Mr Conte’s only real hope of forming a third government will be if he can lure back Mr Renzi and his Italia Viva into the coalition from which they split just two weeks ago. Parliamentary numbers dictate this. The formal position both of Cinque Stelle and of the PD is that they want to stick with Mr Conte, or go to elections. But their real position is likely to be rather different. They would quite like to get rid of Mr Conte. They want to avoid elections because they would lose, because the number of seats in the Chamber and the Senate are being cut by one-third, and because for all those losing their seats the loss of income that would result is high. In the English phrase, these turkeys are not going to want to vote for Christmas.

Oh, and there’s one other obscure Italian political fact that you need to know. Article 88 of the Constitution forbids the holding of a general election within six months of the end of a presidential term, and Sergio Mattarella’s seven-year term ends next January. This means that whatever new government is formed just needs to muddle through until July, following which there will be no hope of an election until after the current parliament has chosen a new president (or re-elected Mr Mattarella). That is soothing for the centre-left, as one of their greatest fears is of Mr Salvini’s centre-right winning a general election strongly enough then to be able to install a president of his choosing.

So what will happen? At a time when managing the pandemic, the vaccine programme and the use of EU recovery funds should be paramount, Italy is going to spend weeks of haggling between parties and their leaders. If Mr Conte succeeds in staying on as prime minister, it will chiefly be because the parties could not agree on anyone else. Yet other candidates do exist. The most difficult party to satisfy is Cinque Stelle, because they have no leader of their own, have no real strategy and are unified mainly by what they oppose rather than what they favour. Hence while Mr Conte remained colourless and neutral, he was acceptable. One candidate who could fit the bill is Enrico Giovannini, a highly respected economist who served in the Enrico Letta government of 2013-14 as labour minister, was president of the national statistics agency following a distinguished spell at the OECD, and is now a prominent advocate of sustainable development. His green credentials would appeal to Cinque Stelle, while his mainstream economics background would reassure financial markets and President Mattarella. My money would be on him, rather than Mr Conte. But this is politics, so who knows?