The 5 Star Movement, member of the ruling coalition, boycotted a vote of confidence on a text discussed this Thursday in the Senate, jeopardizing the government.
The President of the Italian Council, Mario Draghi, announced in the Council of Ministers that he would submit his resignation on Thursday evening. ” I want to announce to you that this evening I will submit my resignation to the President of the Republic. Sergio Mattarella, said Mr. Draghi, according to remarks reported in a press release from his services. Thus ends the standoff between the President of the Council and the leader of the Five Star movement, Giuseppe Conte. After days of verbal threats and unsuccessful mediations, the leader of the 5-Star Movement had pronounced the break with the majority, which since February 2021 had been binding in a kind of “national unity government almost all of the country’s political forces, with the notable exception of the nationalist Fratelli d’Italia party.
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Thursday, while the Senate was voting on a 23 billion aid plan for households and businesses, to which was attached a vote of confidence in the government, the Five Star senators left the hemicycle not to participate in the vote confidence requested by the executive. If confidence was nevertheless voted with 172 votes, the large majority on which Mario Draghi had supported his government is no longer.
The Milan Stock Exchange fell by up to 4%. And the 10-year yield spread with the German Bund climbed to 210 points, a sign of market concern over the return of political instability in Italy, as the country grapples with a crisis situation. he great complexity must manage several crises, including the one linked to soaring energy prices. And must set up in the next few years the gigantic investment plan of nearly 200 billion euros financed in part by Europe.
At the origin of the political crisis, a pretext, the introduction of a standard in the aid plan which allows the creation of a waste incinerator in Rome, a project against which the M5S has been fighting for months, judging it costly, polluting and inefficient. “The M5S has supported this government since its inception with its two pillars of ecological transition and social justice “, still justified Thursday Giuseppe Conte, who is not a senator. “If then we create a forcing and a blackmail by which rules against the ecological transition enter into a decree that has nothing to do, for nothing in the world we will give our votes. »
The day before yesterday, however, Giuseppe Conte seemed unwilling to bring down the government. To weigh more within the majority, he had transmitted a week ago to Mario Draghi a list in nine points of his conditions so that the movement remains in the majority, including the establishment of a minimum wage (which does not exist not in Italy), and a set of measures in favor of the poorest households. He hoped to win his case on each point, and to extract small victories to establish his legitimacy in front of his parliamentarians and the last Five Star voters. His gesture of rupture is therefore deemed incomprehensible at a time when the government is passing a massive aid plan for the benefit of households and businesses, and when it is preparing to adopt a minimum wage and an income policy for the benefit of working poor. If he thought he could regain control of the situation, and avoid the fall of the government in extremis, Giuseppe Conte seems to have ended up being overtaken by his most radical base.
This faux pas is explained by Giuseppe Conte’s desperate attempt to raise the 5-star Movement in the polls: elected the first political force in Parliament in 2018, with 34% of the vote, the movement, which betrayed one after the other all its original struggles, has since suffered a regular erosion of its voter base, until it does not today exceed 11 to 12% of voting intentions for the next legislative elections. If each local ballot proves to be one more step towards extinction, in Parliament, its base of elected officials has itself shrunk considerably with the many departures to other parliamentary groups, and more recently, after the split of elected officials who, behind the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, left the movement to form the IPF group, for Insieme per Il Futuro “Five Star leaders have been planning for months to open a crisis to end the Draghi government, explained Luigi Di yesterday. Maio.They were counting on nine months of electoral campaign to go up in the polls, but thus they condemned the country to fall into the economic and social precipice. »
Mario Draghi, who nevertheless still has a majority in number of elected members in both Chambers, considers that he no longer has the large majority on which this government was based. Two days earlier, he explained during a press conference that without the 5 Star Movement the government could not last. But that in any case, there was no longer any question for him of leading a government under the permanent blackmail of the components of the majority. The important thing for him is to be able to act, and not to last.
So the President of the Council went up to the Quirinal shortly after the counting of the votes of the senators, as he had promised. After almost an hour of talks with the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, his decision was made.