Italy’s 5-Star calls for June vote; president ponders options
Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement on Friday dismissed calls for a unity government, saying an immediate re-vote was needed to resolve the deadlock created by a national election in March.
President Sergio Mattarella has called a final round of talks with party leaders on Monday to try to secure a coalition deal but, failing that, he is expected to seek backing for a technocrat government to help keep Italy’s finances on track, Reuters reported.
However, 5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that an election should be held on June 24, waving away concerns that there was no time to organize it and dismissing the need for a stopgap administration.
He also rejected suggestions that Parliament should revise the electoral law yet again to try to stave off future deadlock: “It can’t be done. We would waste years arguing about it.”
The last four Italian prime ministers took office thanks to backroom deals rather than ballot-box victories, and repeated efforts to devise an electoral law allowing the swift formation of a government have failed to come up with a winning formula.
At the March 4 election, a center-right alliance led by the anti-immigrant League won the most seats, 5-Star emerged as the biggest single party and the center-left Democratic Party (PD) limped in third. No group came close to securing a majority.
A matrix of vetoes has prevented the parties doing a deal, with friction and frustration growing by the day.
The president does not want to dissolve Parliament, and instead hopes to put together a short-term government to draw up a 2019 budget, which has to be approved by the end of December, a source in his office told Reuters on Wednesday.
Unless there is a new budget, an increase in sales taxes will be triggered automatically, which would jeopardize Italy’s fragile economic recovery. Newspapers reported on Friday that the head of state might name a non-political prime minister as early as next Tuesday, tasked with trying to win a workable parliamentary majority for a limited and clearly defined mandate.
If the person failed to win the necessary confidence votes, they would remain in charge in a caretaker capacity, and a fresh election would be held in September or October. Opinion polls suggest new elections would still end in stalemate.
With Italy potentially heading back to the polls, old campaign themes returned to the fore, with the founder of 5-Star, Beppe Grillo, reviving a recently discarded party policy to hold a referendum on Italy’s euro membership.
“I want the Italian people to give their view,” he was quoted as saying in an interview with the French website putsch.media.