Caretaker Italy PM gathers team amid tensions

ROME: Italy’s caretaker prime minister assembled a Cabinet line-up despite almost certain rejection by populist parties whose bid for power collapsed at the weekend.

Fresh elections are now looming as the most likely outcome of the long-running political saga sparked by an inconclusive poll in March.

Carlo Cottarelli, a former International Monetary Fund economist known as “Mr Scissors”, was tasked with naming a technocrat government on Monday after President Sergio Mattarella blocked a Cabinet proposed by the far-right League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement).

The president vetoed their pick for economy minister, fierce eurosceptic Paolo Savona, throwing the eurozone’s third largest economy into a fresh crisis.

Savona has called the euro a “German cage” and said Italy needed a plan to leave the single currency “if necessary”.

Mattarella said an openly eurosceptic economy minister was counter to the parties’ joint promise to simply “change Europe for the better from an Italian point of view”.

Cottarelli said Italy would face new elections “after August” if parliament did not endorse his team, a near certainty given that Five Star and the League together hold a majority.

The parties’ approved nominee for prime minister, lawyer and political novice Giuseppe Conte, stepped aside after the decision to reject Savona, crashing the proposed government after nearly three months of convoluted horse-trading.

Mattarella’s veto and subsequent nomination of Cottarelli as caretaker prime minister sparked angry calls for his impeachment, since most lawmakers backed Savona.

League leader Matteo Salvini, a fellow eurosceptic who was Savona’s biggest advocate, said the antiestablishment government failed because of pressure from the “powers that be, the markets, Berlin and Paris”.

“This isn’t democracy, this isn’t respect for the popular vote. It’s the latest slap in the face,” Salvini said, from those that say “Italy should be a slave, scared and precarious”.

Five Star chief Luigi Di Maio called on party supporters to attend a rally in Rome on Saturday, the anniversary of Italy’s transformation into a republic in 1946, after what he called “Italian democracy’s darkest night”.

The latest chapter in the drawnout political saga sent Italian stocks tumbling more than 2% percent on Monday and bond yields surging, with Italy’s debt risk premium hitting its highest level since November 2013. — AFP

This isn’t democracy ... it’s the latest slap in the face. Matteo Salvini