May 29, 2018
Italian President summons Carlo Cottarelli as election turmoil deepens
Italy's
President is expected Monday to ask a former International Monetary
Fund official to be interim prime minister after leading populist
parties dropped out of a bid to form a government.Find the more Europe news from SHINE.
The move comes after the populist coalition's choice for prime
minister, Giuseppe Conte, abandoned his attempt to form a government
following President Sergio Mattarella's refusal to endorse his
euroskeptic choice for finance minister.
President Sergio Mattarella
said he had agreed with all of Conte's other demands, but his choice
for finance minister, Paolo Savona, was unacceptable because his
appointment would alarm investors and have dangerous consequences for
Italy's outstanding government debt.
Italy has not had a government since it went to the polls in March, the longest such period in the country's postwar history.
Mattarella
has summoned Carlo Cottarelli, former director of fiscal affairs at the
IMF, to discuss forming an interim government, as new elections seem
increasingly inevitable.Italy's public debt stood at 2.3 trillion euros
at the end of March, according to the nation's central bank. Italy's
credit rating may be cut by Moody's over concerns about the new
government's fiscal plans and the risk that some important past
measures, such as pension reform, might be reversed.
"I asked for
that ministry an authoritative political figure from the coalition
parties who was not seen as the supporter of a line that could provoke
Italy's exit from the euro," Mattarella said in a televised speech.
Reacting to the move, a populist leader, Five Star chief Luigi Di Maio, called for the president's impeachment.
"(What) if we have elections and we win and then we go to the
President's palace and they say we cannot form a government?" Di Maio
told RAI show "Che Tempo Che Fa," according to Italian news agency
ANSA.That's why I say it is necessary to put the President under a state
of accusation."
The leader of the far-right League Party, Matteo
Salvini, declined to comment on the possibility of impeachment,
according to ANSA, suggesting that he was profoundly annoyed that his
attempts to form government had been denied. Di Maio and Salvini formed a
coalition after alliances with mainstream parties did not materialize.
At the election, Italian voters eschewed established political parties
and flocked to League and the anti-establishment Five Star party, driven
in part by anti-immigrant sentiment and overall dissatisfaction with
the previous, centrist government.
Five Star won the most votes, followed by the League, but the election did not return a majority to any single party.
The populists ditched some of their most incendiary campaign vows, such
as calling for a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro or
leave the European Union. But they promised a spending and tax-cutting
binge that has rattled investors and could contain the seeds of a new
European crisis.A populist government in Rome could make it more
difficult for EU leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel to push further political and economic
integration of the bloc.
Italy's prospect of going back to the polls
has been raised before since March, with the failure of repeated
attempts to form a coalition government.
Mattarella said that a non-aligned administration could be a stopgap solution to the country's political stalemate.
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