The Conte-Renzi war: an update

For those diehards like me who are addicted to the game of Italian politics

The political drama created by Matteo Renzi, the young Florentine former prime minister who wants to maintain his national relevance, looks like being surprisingly short-lived. Given that Renzi withdrew his ministers from the coalition government led by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte last week and hence the formal support of Renzi’s small party, Italia Viva, in the two houses of Italy’s Parliament, Conte has to submit himself to new votes of confidence on Monday in the Chamber of Deputies and on Tuesday in the Senate. It now seems that he will win those votes. The only question is by how much.

The reason Conte will win the votes is that Renzi has now said that Italia Viva will abstain in both houses. So as long as Renzi doesn’t change his mind by Monday, there will be no real difficulty for Conte to achieve a majority. After the votes, Conte will continue in office as the head of a minority government, which is a rare creature in Italy. All he will have to do immediately is to appoint new ministers to replace those from Renzi’s party. But the consequence is that he and his government will now face a negotiation over every major or controversial piece of legislation, which is far from an ideal way to manage policy during a pandemic nor, in particular, to manage an economic strategy which will be dominated by spending plans for the loans and grants due to come from the EU Next Generation (aka Recovery) Fund.

Which is why the issue of how easily Conte wins the confidence votes, especially in the Senate where the governing parties are weaker, will be crucial for this will set the tone for those law-by-law negotiations — and in effect will determine how long this minority government will last before it needs to be replaced by something stronger.

Renzi looks to have decided to abstain for two reasons: he wants to show that he has leverage over the government and that it will now operate on his sufferance; and, more negatively for him, he wants to avoid a split in his own party over whether to support Conte or not. Thus the first thing to watch on Monday and Tuesday is whether this abstention does indeed avoid a split in Italia Viva. If IV deputies and senators break ranks and vote for Conte, it will greatly weaken Renzi and might well mean that he is finished, at least for the time being.

On the other hand, the second thing to watch is how many votes Conte manages to gain from those not formally in the governing coalition, whether of IV members or, more likely, of others, especially in the Senate. Five senators who were previously classed as being in the “Gruppo Misto” but nevertheless generally voted with the government have now set up a new parliamentary group, “Maie Italia23”, which stands for “never elections until 2023”. The vote on Tuesday will show whether others now plan to join that group, which will also be a measure of whether Conte has a potential party of his own in Parliament to form part of a future governing coalition, or whether his support is more transactional and contingent.

A strong showing by Conte, say of 160 votes or more in the Senate, will be a sign that he will be around for quite a while yet. A weak showing will suggest that Renzi retains the upper hand and that this minority government really cannot last long. It will then be only a matter of time before either Conte has to lure Renzi back in to the coalition by making concessions to him, or before the big parties, Cinque Stelle and the Partito Democratico, decide they have no choice but to replace Conte with a new prime minister in order to bring Renzi and IV back into the fold.

Either way, at present early elections remain the least likely outcome, by quite a long chalk.