M5S-PD Coalition Set to Govern Italy

It took about 14 months for the Five Star Movement-League coalition government to burst apart, but explode it has. Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte resigned Tuesday ahead of a no confidence vote. The no confidence vote was brought about League firebrand and government interior minister Matteo Salvini withdrawing his support from the coalition.

The widely accepted view is that Salvini sees the late summer as his best opportunity to hold new elections, the result of which would be to make him prime minister. Over the last year the anti-immigrant League has replaced the Five Star Movement (M5S) as the most popular party in Italy. In May's European Parliament elections the League won 34% of the vote, whereas the M5S, with close to 33% in the national parliamentary elections last year, fell to 17%.

Today Italian president Sergio Mattarella will meet with party leaders to see if a new coalition can form a government. The main contender is M5S-Democratic Party (PD) combine; strange bedfellows given that M5S came to power relentlessly skewering the neoliberal austerity and Brussels group-think of the PD. But the bigger threat for both parties now is the dramatic rise of the Italian Trump, Salvini.

If Mattarella fails to find a successor coalition, something explained by Marianne Arens, he can always name a technocratic government:

The next step is at the discretion of the 78-year-old President Mattarella, who himself comes from the PD. If no new coalition is formed, he could also appoint a government of experts, which would then also require a parliamentary majority. If Mattarella opts for new elections, which is considered unlikely, they must take place within 60 days. One last possibility would be for the Lega and the Five Star Movement to resume their coalition.

The politics of the collapse of the M5S-League government has to do with writing a budget due in October. Arens explains,

The most immediate task of the next government is to present a budget that complies with European Union deficit guidelines by October 15, which will require massive cuts at the expense of the working class. If the PD and the Five Stars take on this task, Salvini and Lega, which would then nominally be in opposition, could be further strengthened.

The acidic Jason Horowitz  writing in the neoliberal NYT notes that "Some analysts speculated that Mr. Salvini actually wanted out in order to avoid the difficult budget cutting required in the coming months to avoid an automatic tax hike."

My guess is that the Democratic Party will aggressively pursue the coalition with M5S, confident that it can zombify the party in the next three years. M5S will likely go along because its fate at the polls looks particularly bleak now. The question is whether the online membership of the M5S will ratify a coalition with the PD.