Populist asked to form new government, Giuseppe Conte. Sound familiar?
Italy’s Establishment Runs Out of Trick
Christopher Caldwell, Weekly Standard.
A political establishment of long standing always suffers from a kind of mental illness. No matter how unambiguously it is repudiated or how joyously it is driven from office, its members will continue to remember the episode as accidental, temporary, and unjust. This week in Italy such arrogance nearly provoked a financial panic and an international crisis. In elections in March, two parties relatively new to the national scene had blown away all their establishment rivals and taken a majority of the seats in the national assembly. Because one of them, the League, was a nationalist party of the sort associated with France’s Marine Le Pen, while the other, the Five Star Movement (M5S), was founded by a madcap comedian, observers snickered at how entertaining it would be to watch these two collections of losers try to cobble together a coalition.
They wound up doing fine, though, because they have one big thing in common. They both hate the multinational European Union, which has hamstrung most of the continent’s economies and stripped its member states of much of their sovereignty. By May, the parties were ready to roll, with a broad coalition agreement and a full team of cabinet members. But at that point Italy’s mostly ceremonial president, Sergio Mattarella, stepped in. He blocked the appointment of economics minister Paolo Savona, on the grounds that Savona had long been skeptical about the common European currency, the euro.
The vast majority of Italians are skeptical about the euro, too, of course. Their skepticism is part of what brought M5S and the League to power in the first place. But confronted with an assertion of official authority, politicians and the public have tended to roll over. Yes, the establishment did run up too much debt in the past—about $2.7 trillion, as it happens. But that means one false move could spell catastrophe! There was a lot of warning about “lo spread,” as the obsessively charted difference between German and Italian bond rates is called. President Mattarella asked Carlo Cottarelli, a longtime employee of the despised International Monetary Fund, to lead a technocratic government, hopefully until 2019.
But this time was different. The two new anti-establishment leaders did not fall into line. They called the Cottarelli appointment a scam. Matteo Salvini of the League called for fresh elections in the fall. Luigi Di Maio of M5S called for nationwide demonstrations on June 2 and the impeachment of Mattarella. Strange that Savona’s opposition to the euro was a disqualification to serve in government, Di Maio said, since, to judge from governments past, being a liar or a thief was not. So much of the country rallied behind Di Maio and Salvini that not even the pro-euro Democratic party (PD), chased out of office over the winter, dared to back Cottarelli.
On Monday, May 28, there was the beginning of a run on Italy’s bonds. The market was more nervous about the “responsible” Cottarelli than it had been about the “irresponsible” Salvini and Di Maio. The reason is not far to seek. Once Salvini and Di Maio’s majority had been denied the right to form a government on the grounds that one of its ministers was a europhobe, the impending election appeared to be a referendum on the common European currency. It would be like Brexit: Exitaly was the snappy portmanteau making the rounds. And it would be a rout: On one side, a majority growing more popular by the day, plus the principle of Italian self-rule and national self-respect. On the other side, the European bureaucrats who had messed up Italy’s economy and turned the country into a vassal of Germany, plus Mattarella’s autocracy. Mattarella now had to reopen negotiations at all costs.
This meant dealing with Di Maio. Both he and Salvini have been called “populist,” but really they have different preoccupations. Di Maio is anti-corruption. Salvini is pro-sovereignty. Up till now, the two have been evenly matched. Di Maio’s M5S is twice as big as Salvini’s League, but it is not as big as the center-right bloc (which contains two other parties) that Salvini commands. The present spat over Europe favored Salvini. He was rising in the polls while Di Maio stagnated. Salvini was thus content to wait for elections in the fall; Di Maio needed to act soon.
As we went to press, the situation was approaching resolution. Giuseppe Conte, the candidate for prime minister whom Salvini and Di Maio preferred, will take his post as originally planned. Savona will become the minister for European affairs. The negotiation will have taken 88 days, longer than it has taken to form any postwar Italian government, but not so long as recent coalition negotiations in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The problem is not that parties have been getting more obstreperous but that Europe is getting harder to govern
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
is a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard
