Italy’s government collapses. What now?
The corkscrew twists and turns of current Italian politics would challenge the comprehension of Archimedes, inventor of the screw principle. The 66th government of the Italian Republic has just collapsed. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has resigned, hoping to be made prime minister again with a government lineup much like the one that has just quit.
The crisis was triggered by a former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, leader of a splinter party, Italia Viva (Living Italy), walking out of the government. He hopes that with the right roll of the dice he could be prime minister again – or get some other top job, like secretary general of Nato.
“Renzi suffers from what in Italy we call the ‘ego super aumentato’ – the turbo-charged ego,” says Donatella Cinelli Colombini, a famed wine producer in Brunello country south of Siena, and the phenomenally successful founder and leader of ‘Donne del Vino’ promoting women in the wine business. “To bring the government down is the most absurd folly, given what Italy is going through. It is symptomatic of this government – which believes in politics by Instagram and WhatsApp and not much more.”
Renzi, who once aimed to be Italy’s Tony Blair, said he pulled out of the government coalition because he disagreed with prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s approach to how Italy should spend the EU’s €200 billion for recovery from Covid. Renzi said that Conte was being too cautious. By all accounts Giuseppe Conte, who is an academic and not a professional politician, is concerned that Brussels is about to put severe austerity conditions on the Covid funding. He fears “Italy ending up like Greece after their EU rescue” according to some reports.
The collapse of the government couldn’t come at a worse time. Recorded Covid deaths topped 85,000 at the beginning of the week – a ratio of mortality to population only slightly better than the UK, which has just recorded over 100,000 deaths. The already debt-laden economy is nose diving into recession at much the same rate as the UK. Youth unemployment is an enduring headache, and the ageing profile of the indigenous population is reaching crisis. Nearly a third of all Italian women are unlikely to have children, by circumstance or design.
The present head of state, President Sergio Mattarella, now has the unenviable task of talking to all factions and parties before deciding who to ask to form the new government. It looks like more of the same, or the same of more with a wider coalition with a strict time limit, and led by another candidate from the two current leading coalition partners, the Democrats and the populist, crowd-sourced 5 Star Movement, or M5S for short. Franco, one of the most astute public servants I know currently in Italy, says, “you have the problem of Renzi and Giuseppe Conte. It seems it is very, very personal. They have had talks since December. Renzi doesn’t agree with Conte’s policy on the EU funding, of course. But he believes Conte just shouldn’t be there at all.”
The permutations of what might or might not happen next is laid out in a set of six scenarios in La Stampa by the seasoned commentator Ilario Lombardo. They are of Byzantine complexity, and each one progressively more fantastic than the one before. Lombardo suggests there could be a reshuffling of the pack with Renzi agreeing to rejoin a Conte coalition with major overhauls to the EU finding, Covid relief and economic regeneration policies. Early elections are discussed in another scenario, and quickly ruled out. Various candidates are proposed to run the show through the summer such as the current M5S leader and foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, who is seen as a trendy lightweight by much public opinion. Another scenario is to call back former prime minister Paolo Gentiloni from his post as Economics Commissioner in Brussels, or even appointing Mario Draghi, the former EU central banker with a brief to run a government of “technicians”, for the rest of the year.
“I think it’s a really dangerous moment,” says Donatella Colombini, who has been a university professor of art history, and an elected local government officer, assessore, in Siena. “Politics are losing credibility. The politicians now are of such low level – few in the present government have a decent degree. It is reminiscent of the vacuum and chaos after the First World War (which led to Fascism). You get the same eerie sense of the desire for someone really strong to take over.”
“There’s something adrift about the way politics are now,” agrees Franco, the public official. “The parties and their leaders seem in their own reality and dimension, quite adrift from what is going on in the country at the grassroots. They don’t have what you have in Britain where the parliamentarian, the MP, is tied directly to the voters, in the constituencies – and all the time. Some of our MPs only go back to the voters when the elections are coming up.”
Donatella warns, “Virtual imagery now dominates politics – we are ruled by Instagram and WhatsApp – the prime minister’s spokesman and media director came through Italy’s ‘Big Brother’ – ‘Grande Fratello’ – the way he dresses his prime minister and ministers is like an influencer on social media.” Piero, another seasoned public official, agrees, “He speaks like a reality TV host, addressing everyone high and low with ‘Amore’ – the equivalent of Lovie with you, and always uses the familiar ‘tu’ and not the formal ‘lei’ – with which Italians greet a respected new friend or official.”
Piero thinks there is something more at play, not only in Italy. “It’s the effect of Trumpism, which we have felt very strongly in Italy as well as across Europe. It has meant everything goes and a lack of discipline and professionalism which has affected public life very badly. Fake news is part of the package. Now there is a real desire to go back to something else, to professionalism and competence. It’s come back – pretty late – with the election of Biden. I can see this now really beginning to have effect in Britain.”
The sense that things aren’t working, with the Covid crisis as trigger or catalyst, is now being felt in protests and riots across Europe – France, Germany and above all in the Netherlands. Coincidental with a vacuum at the top – the Dutch government resigning in the face of a serious welfare payment scandal – riots have taken place several nights in a row in more than a dozen Dutch towns and cities. Gangs of youths and teenagers have attacked police and public institutions in the name of opposition to Covid lockdown and curfews.
It has led to some bizarre incidents, such as burning down the Covid vaccination station on the picture postcard resort island of Urk in the Ijsselmeer, and stoning the windows of the hospital a provincial capital, Enschede, close to the German border. “It was all very well coordinated, mainly through WhatsApp with gangs being told where police and public buildings could be hit,” says my friend Anja, an experienced public servant, from Amsterdam. “They are mostly very young,” she adds – and many are adherents of the hard-over nativist libertarianism of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party and Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy. Wilders’ group has an active base on Urk. They are fed by the rumour mills and the alterative facts of social media. They come from quite a mix of social and economic backgrounds, which analysts are finding hard to grasp.
The flashflood riots and lockdown (and possibly antivaxx) protests kicked off after the curfew was called by acting prime minister Rutte last Saturday. They have an aspect of mutant jacqueries – the spontaneous revolts across Western Europe, of which the Peasants Revolt of the men of Kent and Essex were an exceptional example. The essence of the jacquerie was a movement without programme or leader. The strong leadership of Wat Tyler and John Ball made the revolt of 1381 different, they had a clear mission and message for the king – sack your rotten politicians. “When Adam delved and Eve span,” Ball preached, “who was then the gentle-man ?”
This is much as the political thinker and commentator Ivan Krastev predicted in his brilliant interview for Reaction at the end of last year on the publication of his essay “Is It Tomorrow Yet?” As the Corona pandemic arrived, he suggested, the threat would – at first – unite people and parties to confront it. “Then it divides society, as people become more isolated and frightened.” That appears to be the process now. He predicted in his book that two of the biggest casualties will be open practical, liberal democracy and a free press. Reporting facts on inquiry and agreed fact will give way, he suggested, to commentary confirming identity by tribal loyalty and ideology.
In the Netherlands Mark Rutte has taken firm action by heading for a new election on 17 March, and denouncing the rioters in no uncertain terms. These are the moves of an experienced and very cool political hand. The opinion polls say that he is popular and likely to be returned with a stronger government. My friend Anja, the civil servant, points out that only 7 per cent in opinion polls oppose lockdown, and 89 per cent are for the curfew in the Netherlands.
Italy like the Netherlands faces the perpetual Rubik’s cube of coalition politics, but with a difference. Early elections, the Rutte gambit, is simply not a feasible solution. Physically, the campaigning and voting process is hard across the peninsula and islands of the Italian Republic. The result would likely be again be a left – right toss-up. The nationalist, nativists and libertarians of Matteo Salvini’s Lega, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, and the megaphone politics of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) are gaining in the polls. But they have little new or practical to offer to tackle the wicked problem of Covid, demography, and double-dip recession now besetting Italy.
Salvation may well be found from an unlikely quarter. The office of President in the Italian Republic is largely ceremonial – head of state, head of the armed and security forces, and head of the judiciary. He – and to date only males have held the post – can dismiss governments and invite and sack prime ministers. He can prevail on the politicians to follow the rules. He can be a wise counsellor and supreme influencer. He can and should be Italy’s top referee in public life. Both Sergio Mattarella and his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano have proved pretty adroit at all the above, particularly in curbing the demagogic excesses of Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Salvini, and even Matteo Renzi, for example.
The new Capo di Stato, Italy’s 13th president, is due to be elected for seven years in January. In discussions with those in the know across Italy and UK this week, two names have come forward – though most of my friends and contacts think it might be time for a woman president. The two names in the swirl of speculation are Mario Draghi, respected world class economist and financier, and Silvio Berlusconi, now 84 and ailing – the man who started the whole television gameshow approach to politics.
You might say you just couldn’t make it up. I think the great baseball coach Yogi Berra put the current predicament much better. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”