Italy's New M5S-PD Government Not Quite a Done Deal

On Wednesday Italian president Sergio Mattarella gave his permission to recently resigned prime minister Giuseppe Conte to form a new government, this one, as Jason Horowitz describes,  "a populist/anti-populist coalition between Five Star and the center-left Democratic Party."

Beppe Severgnini, writing an opinion piece today for The New York Times, is skeptical that M5S-PD will be a lasting marriage:

Still, the outcome is not obvious. A new government is likely to be formed, in the next few days. But the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement are quite different, and so are their voters. If their strange marriage fails, President Mattarella — the coolest head in this whole mess — will have no choice but to dissolve Parliament and call for a general election in the autumn. So Italy is, once again, on the brink — a spot it occupies all too often. Will it manage to take a step back and avoid going over? It might. On three conditions.

First, the political agenda. A government is formed to do something, not to prevent someone else’s rise (even if that someone is Mr. Salvini). The Democratic Party stands for open society, open market, investments, Europe and NATO; Five Star has been toying with conspiracy theories and anti-vaxx propaganda, has ranted against the European Union and supported Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The Democrats belong, in most respects, to the new moderate left; the Five Stars borrow many ideas from the old radical left. A good sign is that the most quarrelsome characters, such as Alessandro Di Battista, are not expected to be in the new government. And the outgoing (and incoming) prime minister just took control of the digital transformation of the notoriously labyrinthine Italian Civil Service.

In other words, what this "government waiting to be born" really is, more than a coalition of populist/anti-populist, as Horowitz formulated, is a coalition of neoliberal/anti-neoliberal. The Five Star Movement established itself criticizing neoliberal austerity and corruption.

David Broder thinks M5S is cravenly opportunistic, stands for nothing and its Rousseau online plebiscite a sham.

We'll see. Luigi Di Maio has promised to clear the new coalition with the M5S rank'n'file. According to Horowitz:

To allay the concerns of the Five Star base, Mr. Di Maio late Tuesday night announced that any government proposals would be subject to a vote on Five Star’s internet platform, where all their candidates and policies are approved.

The platform, called Rousseau, is owned by Davide Casaleggio, an unelected web entrepreneur, who has argued that representative democracy is passé and will soon be replaced by the internet. Party dissidents have said he personally decides the outcome of online votes and is the true power behind Five Star.

On Wednesday, Andrea Orlando, the deputy secretary of the Democratic Party, told reporters that it would be “unacceptable if the vote on Rousseau should enter into conflict with the procedures in the Constitution and on the decisions taken by the president.”

But in an interview Wednesday night, Pietro Dettori, a power broker within Five Star who is close to Mr. Casaleggio, said that while the date of a vote still hadn’t been set, it “will also be on the alliance.”