Caretaker PM assembles Italy cabinet lineup
Italy’s caretaker Prime Minister was assembling a cabinet lineup on Tuesday 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 IMF 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 antiestablishment Five Star Movement (M5S).The president vetoed their
euroskeptic Paolo Savona, throwing the eurozone’s third largest economy into a fresh crisis.
Savona has called the euro a “German cage” and said that Italy needs a plan to leave the single currency “if necessary.”
Mattarella said that an openly euroskeptic 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 following the decision to reject Savona, crashing the proposed government after nearly three months of convoluted horse-trading.
‘Italian democracy’s darkest night’
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 euroskeptic who was Savona’s biggest advocate, said the anti- establishment 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 two percent on Monday and bond yields surging, with Italy’s debt risk premium hitting its highest level since November 2013.