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ITALY-POLITICS-UPDATE
Showdown looms in Italy as caretaker PM assembles team
ROME, May 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – 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 anti-
establishment Five Star Movement (M5S).
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 that Italy needs a plan
to leave the single currency “if necessary”.
Mattarella said that 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 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 eurosceptic 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 drawn-out 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.
The euro also fell in Asian trade on Tuesday and was in danger of falling
below the $1.16 level last breached in early November.
Cottarelli, 64, was director of the International Monetary Fund’s fiscal
affairs department from 2008 to 2013 and became known as “Mr Scissors” for
his public spending cuts in Italy.
He said that should his technocrat government win parliamentary approval,
it would stay in place until elections at the “start of 2019”.
But if parliament fails to approve his government, a new election would be
held “after August” — the most likely outcome given the populists’ strength
in parliament. Only the centre-left Democratic Party has announced that it
would vote in favour.
– ‘Beyond his prerogatives’ –
Salvini and Di Maio furiously denounced the presidential veto, blasting
what they called meddling by Germany, debt ratings agencies, financial
lobbies and even lies from Mattarella’s staff.
“Paolo Savona would not have taken us out of the euro. It’s a lie invented
by Mattarella’s advisors,” Di Maio said in a live video on Facebook. “The
truth is that they don’t want us in government.”
Elections could benefit Salvini, however, as recent polling by
IndexResearch put the League at 22 percent, five points up from its vote
share in the March 4 ballot.
Under the Italian constitution, the president nominates both the prime
minister and, following proposals from the premier, the cabinet.
The most famous example of a president denying a PM’s choice was in 1994
when Eugenio Scalfari refused then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s choice
of his own lawyer — Cesare Previti — as justice minister.
However, Di Maio said that Mattarella, a former constitutional court judge,
had “gone beyond his legal prerogatives”.
He said an impeachment trial for Mattarella, 76, would be “almost a
certainty”.
Most analysts however say such calls have little chance of success as
impeachment is only possible in cases of “high treason” or constitutional
breaches.
“President Mattarella has only exercised his constitutional powers”, said
Massimo Luciani, president of the Italian Constitutionalists Association.
BSS/AFP/IJ/1348 hrs