I missed this, been a bit busy and it didn’t show up as a topic among my other usual suspects. I think it’s significant as an indication of the pressure on most member Nations of the EuroZone and the EU.
Italy’s Right-Wing Government Collapses – Will the Next One Be Better?
The Real News
August 22, 2019
Italy’s coalition government between the right-wing League Party and the populist Five Star Movement collapsed on Tuesday, when Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte resigned. Italy’s latest political crisis began last week, when Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, announced that he wanted a no-confidence vote against his own coalition government so that a new general election could be held. However, his move backfired when Prime Minister Conte decided to resign instead, allowing for coalition talks between the Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party, so that a new government could be formed that would exclude the right-wing League party. Here’s what Democratic Party leader Nicola Zingaretti had to say after meeting with Italy’s President on Thursday.
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Thirteen months ago, when the coalition between the League and the populist anti-corruption Five Star Movement began, the right-wing agitator and strategist Steve Bannon called it a populist experiment. He told The Daily Beast at the time that the cooperation between the League and the Five Star Movement would be almost as significant as the Trump administration or Brexit in shaping a new political order. That experiment, however, seems to be over for now in Italy.
You know, I want to just make a preface. It’s very difficult to explain what happens in Italy to a non-Italian audience because it’s a very bizarre and new situation. All the political forces who are contending in parliament at the moment are different from what they used to be. And so, how can I explain to you who the Five Stars are, just to tell you something? It’s something which can be one thing and another. There is right-wing people inside, there are left-wing people, and they are much more left-wing than Salvini, of course, but it’s difficult to understand. So now what I think that Salvini, in any case, received a coup. I mean, he’s in a more difficult situation than he used to be. He is strong if he goes to the election immediately, but what happened in the last weeks proves that he is not so sure of himself as he used to be.
The wave of demonstrations in Italy in the last weeks against him, knew because lot of people [inaudible] understood that what he was promising to everybody was just fake news. So now, he’s embarrassed and he’s on his retreat. The point is, will the new alliance between the Democratic Party and the Five Star work or not? That’s the question. And my personal— and not just personal— opinion is that the Democrats should have looked for an agreement with the Five Stars from the very beginning. They – “okay, if you accept these points and you are supporting this government – otherwise, no. And instead, they lost a couple of years now in this absurd game which was the government.