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.”

Italy Beats France

The British press has been much more thorough in its coverage of the flourishing conflict between the governments of Italy and France. Last week, in what is being called an "unprecedented" move, France recalled its ambassador to Italy. Why? Because Italian deputy prime minister Luigi Di Maio traveled to France to meet with leaders of the Yellow Vest (gilets jaunes) insurgency (a suitable analogy would be if the Canadian prime minister had traveled to Zuccotti Park to meet with the Occupy Wall Street protesters). Reuters explains that

Di Maio's decision . . . to visit France and meet several representatives of the "yellow vest" movement, which for months has waged a sometimes violent campaign against Macron and his policies, was deemed a bridge too far.

"The idea that a (deputy) prime minister of an EU country would come to France without letting France know in advance ... It's not some harmless thing," said a French diplomatic source. "It's just not acceptable behavior within the EU ...

"One hopes (withdrawing the ambassador) will force some reflection among the political parties and Italian institutions. It cannot help but underline how serious the situation is."

Officials say the ambassador will probably be sent back soon, but tensions are likely to persist.

For the most part, the mainstream media rushed to defend French president Emmanuel Macron. Di Maio and his fellow deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini are routinely dismissed as anti-immigrant populists working to undermine European unity. Italy's torpedoing an EU statement endorsing the U.S.-led coup underway in Venezuela is more grist for the mainstream mill.

The principal bulwark erected around the enfeebled Macron is a demonization of the Yellow Vests as a violent mob. The Reuters headline for yesterday's protest has been the standard messaging for the last month-plus: "More violence in Paris as 'yellow vests' keep marching."

The Saturday gilets jaunes protests, ongoing since November, have maintained their robust size. But the mainstream media, originally balanced in its reporting, has pivoted to emphasizing the violent, destructive nature of the protests. Macron has been lauded, albeit backhandedly, for making concessions to the working class, as well as for launching his "Great National Debate" public relations campaign.

Now the spin, on display in The Guardian, is that Macron has turned things around. The frame here is EU parliamentary elections in May:

Opinion polls in France have suggested that the main impact of one or more gilets jaunes parties running in the European elections would be to reduce support for the far-right party of Marine Le Pen and the far left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

A survey last month by Elabé showed 13% of voters could vote for a gilets jaunes party, knocking three points off the score of Le Pen’s National Rally and 1.5 off that of Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, and extending the lead of Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM).

“A gilets jaunes party would likely mobilise people who do not usually vote, but also take votes from the National Rally and France Unbowed,” Emmanuel Rivière of he pollsters Kantar Public France told Le Monde. “Paradoxically, the principal beneficiary would be the party of the president.”

An Ifop opinion poll published on Wednesday showed Macron’s approval rating surging from 23% in December to 34% in February.

Macron is important to the neoliberal consensus because his victory in 2017 is the last great electoral achievement for the market orthodoxy camp. It took the Jiffy Popping of a brand new political party and a massive"Russian bogeyman" psyop, but a win is a win.

The crisis for the neoliberal elites who govern the globe is that TINA ("There Is No Alternative") no longer holds sway among voters. The Russia bogeyman only works on people already committed to TINA.

There is a very good think piece in The Independent by Kim Sengupta that looks at the diplomatic row between Italy and France through the lens of Libya:

There is a feeling in Italy, not just among the supporters of the current government, and not unjustified, that the country has borne a disproportionate number of refugees while other northern European states are not taking their fair share.

France is a particular target on this count, not just because it has sent refugees back to Italy but also because of its part in getting Nato to carry out the bombing campaign which led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and the state of semi-anarchy in the country which made it a haven for people-smugglers. It is worth recalling that the European Union used to pay Col Gaddafi to ensure that his country was not a major conduit for the trade, and he had broadly kept his side of the bargain.

This is a rare mention of the role of perpetual war in creating the immigration crisis that has led to the growth of populism in Europe.

Salvini, painted as a anti-African racist in the prestige press, a Mussolini wannabe, has scored major points in the dust-up with Macron. Never before, at least to my recollection, has such a balanced synopsis of Italy's position on immigration vis-a-vis France appeared in The New York Times:

On Thursday, Mr. Salvini responded to the French ambassador’s recall with a series of complaints, including France’s closing of its border to stop illegal migrants passing through Italy.

‘‘Stop with pushbacks at the borders,’’ said Mr. Salvini, who leads the anti-immigrant League party, the Italian government’s coalition partner. ‘‘There have been about 60,000 since 2017, and those include children and women abandoned in the forest.’’

[snip] 

The dispute came to a boil last summer over the migrant issue. The Italians, having borne the brunt of the migrant wave since 2015, were outraged last year when Mr. Macron denounced the new Italian government for failing to take in hundreds of migrants aboard the Aquarius humanitarian rescue boat.

The Italian prime minister’s office reacted with fury, saying it could not “accept hypocritical lessons from a country that, on migration, has always preferred to turn its back on its partners.” And it was true that France has made a regular practice of blocking migrants crossing the Italian border.

“The Italians have been justified — a lot of Italians feel that France’s behavior, with its grand speeches but refusal to welcome migrants, is unacceptable,” Mr. Lazar said.

For this reason alone -- clarifying the dispute on immigration between Italy and France -- Salvini and Di Maio have come out ahead of Macron in this kerfuffle.

It's Luigi Di Maio of the Five Star Movement, Not the League's Matteo Salvini, Who is the Real Power

Well, the technocratic government of Carlo Cottarelli, the one president Sergio Mattarella blessed after tomahawking the M5S-League combine, is being hastily and quietly dismissed. The negative reaction of the divine market quickly made it apparent to Mattarella that he had blundered enormously. Cottarelli would not survive a confidence vote, and it would be back to the campaign hustings as early as July. Matteo Salvini of the League and Luigi Di Maio of the Five Star Movement (M5S) would pad their parliamentary majority.

So Salvini and Di Maio are back to negotiating with Mattarella. The deal, depending on where you read about it, involves getting rid of Paolo Savona as minister of the economy. The Guardian reports that

The leader of the Italian far-right party the League, Matteo Salvini, has cancelled political rallies to return to Rome, in what was seen as a sign that a political impasse that has left the country without a fully functioning government for months may soon be coming to an end.

Salvini was heading back to the capital to meet his coalition partner, Luigi Di Maio, the head of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, after the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, gave the pair more time to form a government.

Italian press reports indicated that any agreement to form a new populist government involving the League, formerly known as the Northern League, and M5S would include the nomination – again – of Giuseppe Conte, a formerly obscure law professor, to serve as prime minister.

But Di Maio and Salvini are expected to back down on their earlier insistence that Paolo Savona, a Eurosceptic who has called Italy’s adoption of the euro a “historic mistake”, should serve as finance minister.

The odious Jason Horowitz, writing for The New York Times, sees another element to the bargain. Not only is Savona out, but so too is Conte:

But simultaneous negotiations with the Five Star Movement seemed to center on a top official in his party, Giancarlo Giorgetti, taking the position of prime minister. Some analysts speculated that Mr. Salvini coveted the position himself, and that he had the leverage of Mr. Savona, and his own popularity, to force the Five Star leadership to accept.

The Five Star Movement, reluctant to give up its primacy in the alliance, after winning nearly a third of the Italian vote, is resisting, according to reports in the Italian press. And Mr. Mattarella, who is very much an audience of one for all of the political performances, would also have to sign off.

It appears that Di Maio has the upper hand here. While Salvini has been strutting and preening, Di Maio has been trying to salvage the nascent M5S-League government. His reasonableness is conveyed by the Guardian quote,

Di Maio said that if a deal could not be reached, he favoured snap elections. “There are two paths ahead. Either we launch the Conte government with a reasonable solution or we vote right away,” he said.

For all the talk that Salvini is surging, I would not rule out M5S as the party on the rise. Di Maio has displayed his prowess.

Why Italy is Important: The Neoliberal Center No Longer Believes Its Own Prescriptions

Isn't the irony rich that markets are responding so negatively to the diktats of their champions? The M5S-League government was aborted in deference to the wisdom of the markets, and the markets have deemed this an unwise decision. As Yves Smith says this morning in "NIRP’s Revenge: Italian Bonds Plunge, Worst Day in Decades":

Yves here. While Mr. Market got in quite a tizzy today over 5 Star and Lega’s abandonment of their effort to form a coalition government after the President Sergio Mattarella nixed their choice of economy minister, Paolo Savona. This has produced a first-class political crisis. The technocrats, in trying to appease Mr. Market, has done the reverse.

The Times editorial board spins this obvious blunder -- this is the preferred argument du jour for neoliberals -- as a necessary move to allow Italian voters to come to their senses:

However spooked the markets were, they had been equally wary of the coalition and its grandiose spending plans, and given the mutual hostility of the coalition partners, their government might not have survived for long. Mr. Mattarella’s stand, at least, gives Italian voters a second chance to weigh their options after glimpsing what their earlier choices might mean. That’s something some Brexit voters in Britain, or Trump voters in the United States, might have welcomed.

Such an argument doesn't appeal to Italians though, as Steven Erlanger notes in his lengthy write-up, "Italy Pushes Euro to Fore, the Last Place Europe Wants It":

On Tuesday, the European Commissioner for the budget, Günther H. Oettinger, a German, told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle that the markets and a “darkened outlook” would teach the Italians to vote for the right thing. 

They may yet do so, but it’s impolitic to say so, especially for a Brussels-based German.

One of the first to point out the offense was Mr. Di Maio himself, who in his own message on Twitter called the remark “absurd.”

“These people treat Italy like a summer colony where they come to vacation,” Mr. Di Maio wrote. “But in a few months a government of change will be born and Europe will finally respect us.”

Di Maio is right; hence, the market reaction.

This marks an important turning. The neoliberal center no longer believes in its own prescriptions.

"Italian Voters! Achtung! We're Doing You a Favor by Not Honoring the Results of This Election."

UPDATE: Succinct statement on Italy's political crisis lifted from the comments section of this morning's post, "Italy’s Political Crisis….How Ugly Might It Get?," by Yves Smith:

Please take the time, if you will, to ponder on article 1 of the Italian Constitution, and tell me how 25% unemployment, a majority without government, a government without majority, the fifth unelected prime minister in 5 years and street protests against the Head of State square with this:

Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution.

****

I read the headline in the airport "Populist Parties in Italy Fail to Form Government," and I was confused. I had been away from newspapers and television news over the weekend. Last I heard the M5S-League government was on its way to a successful launch. Maybe there had been a last second dust-up between Salvini and Di Maio over the choice of Paolo Savona, an academic who has questioned the wisdom of the euro, as minister of the economy.

But that was not the case. Reading the story by the odious Jason Horowitz, it was apparent that the headline was one of the more misleading in a seemingly daily grab bag of misleading headlines. The populist parties did not fail to form a government. President Sergio Mattarella tomahawked the infant government as it was exiting the birth canal.

In this he did the bidding of the banks, the member states of the European Union, as well as the mainstream press. All had been calling for Mattarella to crush the M5S-League upstarts. They got their wish. Even better for the neoliberal center, Mattarella asked a former International Monetary Fund bureaucrat to form a new government.

As Jason Horowitz reports today in story with a much more accurate headline, "Italian President’s Loyalty to the Euro Creates Chaos":

On Monday morning, as markets rose and fell with the whiplashing events in Italy, Mr. Mattarella gave a new mandate to form a government to Carlo Cottarelli, a respected economist, former International Monetary Fund official and Italian government appointee, who told reporters that he would form a caretaker government only with the goal of passing a budget and guiding Italy to new elections.

If Parliament votes in support of his caretaker government, elections would take place in early 2019. If it does not, which seems much more likely, he would quit “immediately” and elections would take place sometime after August.

RT reports that there is zero chance that Cottarelli's technocratic government will be supported in parliament:

Italian journalist Marcello Foa told RT that Cottarelli’s chances of forming a new government are “non-existent,”noting that the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and its rightist coalition ally Lega Nord are unlikely to support Cottarelli’s efforts because they would then “lose all credibility with the voters.” The two parties were the top performers in March’s parliamentary elections and have spent the last two months negotiating the formation of a coalition government.

Yanis Varoufakis appears on the mark with his dissection: "President Mattarella of Italy: From moral drift to tactical blunder":

Beyond his moral drift (as he condones Mr Salvini’s industrial-scale misanthropy while vetoing a legitimate concern about the eurozone’s capacity to let Italy breathe in its midst), President Mattarella has made a major tactical blunder.

In short, he fell right into Mr Salvini’s trap. The formation of another ‘technical’ government, under a former IMF apparatchik, is a fantastic gift to Mr Salvini.

Mr Salvini is secretly salivating at the thought of another election – one that he will fight not as the misanthropic, divisive populist that he is but as the defender of democracy against the Deep Establishment. Already last night he scaled the high moral with the stirring words: “Italy is not a colony, we are not slaves of the Germans, the French, the spread or finance.”

If Mr Mattarella takes solace from the fact that previous Italian Presidents managed to put in place technical governments that did the establishment’s job (so ‘successfully’ that the country’s political centre was destroyed), he is very badly mistaken. This time around he, unlike his predecessors, has no parliamentary majority to pass a budget or indeed to give his government a vote of confidence. Thus, he is forced to go into elections that, courtesy of his moral drift and tactical incompetence, will return an even stronger majority for 5S-Lega, possibly in alliance with the enfeebled Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi.

And then what Mr Mattarella? 

For a sample of how the mainstream is spinning Mattarella's radical move, take a look at "What Comes Next for Italy?" by Beppe Severgnini, editor in chief of Corriere della Sera’s magazine 7:

Right or wrong, the financial markets and the rest of Europe were convinced that the proposed government was a fundamental threat; now that it has been sidetracked, they will do what they can to prevent its return.

[snip]

It sounds naïve to say it, but the real winners here are Italy’s voters. Thanks to their coolheaded president, they have a chance to rethink their answers to a very important question. By voting for the League and Five Star, they set Italy on a collision course with the European Union. British voters made a similarly emotional decision to leave the union, and they don’t get a second chance. Italy should consider itself lucky: A solid Constitution is better than a rushed referendum.

This is how the radical neoliberal center paves the way for fascism -- "Voters! Achtung! We're doing you a favor by not honoring the results of this election."

NYT Editorializes Against New Italian Government

The editorial page of The New York Times takes aim at Italy's nascent M5S-League government in "The Populists Take Rome." Its main purposes is to repeat previous slurs: Conte inflated his resume with universities he never attended; Di Maio is a college dropout; Salvini wears a sweatshirt (oh, my). It's exhausted and foolish. One imagines that these nameless editorial writers feel suffocated having to churn out attack after attack in defense of a status quo to which no one is devoted other than the rich and powerful.

The exhaustion is on display in the tepid concession paragraph:

Yet the new Italian government cannot be dismissed as just another in Italy’s long history of political crises. The shift of a core member of the European Union, one whose allegiance to the “European project” had not been in doubt, toward the new Central European members hostile to Brussels is a serious blow to the deeper European integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The editorial doesn't mention that Merkel is on her way out and Macron is diminishing by the day. The political center as wishfully conceived by The New York Times does not exist.

Do You Remember Yanis Varoufakis and MH17? Two Huge Hurdles for New Italian Government

Yes, Italy's M5S-League Government = Reprise of Greece 2015. The issue is basically the same. Can a sovereign government engage in deficit spending to stimulate its economy without the eurocrats in Brussels and Frankfurt vetoing it by means of engineering a punishing banking crisis? And if the answer is no, then will the new government be brought to heel or, mixing metaphors, will it collapse in the crib?

Italy is much larger than Greece (like a cruiserweight vs. a middleweight). So it has more punching power at its disposal. Also, France has been allowed to run deficits without punishment. But the problem is that the marriage of the Five Star Movement and the League is one that M5S party fathers appear to have embraced out of fear that their electoral mandate is fast fading. A little counter-punching from Brussels and Luigi Di Maio might very well go down.

When in Doubt, Poke the Bear. Now that Giuseppe Conte has survived Jason Horowitz's smear and been asked by president Sergio Mattarella to form a government, and that government is firmly opposed to continuing EU sanctions on Russia, sanctions that were put in place following the media firestorm that accompanied the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the death of all 296 passengers, it is no coincidence that the kangaroo "Joint Investigative Team" would hold a press conference to announce that Russia was responsible.

There is absolutely no new evidence provided.

"Prosecutors showed photos and videos of a truck convoy carrying the system as it crossed the border from Russia to Ukraine. It crossed back several days later with one missile missing. The vehicles had serial numbers and other markings that were unique to the 53rd brigade, an anti-aircraft unit based in the western Russian city of Kursk, they said.

It's the same several-years-old Eliot Higgins chicanery repeatedly debunked by the late Robert Parry. But it needs to be dusted off and spotlighted anew because Italy now poses a threat to continuing EU sanctions on Russia.

Another Brexit-Size Shock to the EU?

It finally happened. A government is on the verge of being formed in Italy.

Italian parliamentary elections took place on March 4, followed by round after round of inconclusive negotiations. The main sticking point for the top vote-getting party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), was the center-right's insistence that Silvio Berlusconi be prime minister.

Once the League's Matteo Salvini agreed to sideline the octogenarian -- the League is the real power of the center-right coalition, not Berlusconi's Forza Italia -- things got cooking; that, and president Sergio Mattarella threatened to name a technocratic caretaker government.

The League-M5S plan has been published, and it has two components that are sure to stir things up: an end to the EU sanctions on Russia and an increase in debt spending. RT crows, "Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement and Lega Nord parties have called for an immediate lifting of sanctions imposed on Russia." Reuters outlines other features of the plan:

The document, published after 11 weeks of political stalemate in the euro zone’s third-largest economy, calls for billions of euros in tax cuts, additional spending on welfare for the poor, and a roll-back of pension reforms.

The euro sank on the latest developments on Friday and was headed for its fifth straight weekly fall against the dollar, in what would be a first for the currency since 2015.

The possibility of a eurosceptic government in Rome is shaking investor confidence ... at this point, a larger fiscal deficit and greater bond issuance (in Italy) does seem likely,” said David Madden, a strategist at CMC Markets.

The euro gave up gains and fell 0.2 percent to $1.1778 after the Italian parties outlined their economic plans. It settled near a five-month low reached on Wednesday of $1.1763.

The final accord dropped a previous draft proposal, seen by Reuters, to create fiscal headroom by adjusting the formula used to calculate debt burdens in the EU, and contained nothing questioning Italy’s membership of the euro.

But it still called for a review of EU governance and fiscal rules — setting the stage for the bloc’s biggest political challenge since Britain voted to leave two years ago.

So we're right back to back to Syriza 2015 and the question of whether a nation-state can change course through democratic elections or is the status quo so cemented in place that nothing short of armed rebellion can alter the neoliberal Washington Consensus.

The neoliberals are pining for Mattarella to take control, which Politico encapsulates here:

What role does the president play?
If the deal passes muster with members, the parties will present it to President Mattarella. As guarantor of Italy’s constitution and international treaties, he has the power to approve or reject ministers and even specific bills in the government’s program if he deems them to be unaffordable. He can even reject the coalition government altogether and appoint his own — a power that has been used once before, in 1953.

M5S's Luigi di Maio and Salvini are going to meet with Mattarella Monday. M5S members are currently voting online whether to support the new government. The candidate for prime minister has yet to be named.

Signs are good that an M5S-League government will be the real deal. Reuters says that, "Salvini’s pre-election ally, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, accused him of betraying their centre-right electoral alliance and urged him to back out of the deal with Di Maio and 'come back home'."

The U.S. is already making threats about upending Russian sanctions. From Politico:

In June, the European Council will have to roll over the Russian sanctions that the two parties strongly oppose. Last month Kurt Volker, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, warned Rome that “Italy cannot lift the measures without serious consequences.”

An outbreak of European democracy comes just at the right time. The U.S. is trying to maintain the Continent's vassalage as Trump lurches from brinkmanship in East Asia to the Middle East.

The Washington Consensus is now clearly held together by nothing other than war -- economic warfare, armed conflict, genocide and information war. May the consensus collapse as soon as possible.

Upheaval in Europe Points to War with Russia

War with Russian is still the strong bet. War appears to be a last ditch frantic effort to slow the rapid collapse of the neoliberal center in Europe.

It doesn't look like the Five Star Movement (M5S) is going to govern Italy, as Outis Philalithopoulos explains below. M5S representatives are defecting to other parties. Philalithopoulos predicts a center-right government.

"US, Britain and France prepare onslaught against Syria," Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board:

No less significant than the geopolitical motivations for the war are pressing domestic considerations. All of the major imperialist powers preparing for war are riven by deep internal crises and a growing movement of the working class.

French President Macron has signaled his support for the US war drive as his government is embroiled in a head-on confrontation with transportation workers over his hated neoliberal policies. Germany’s right-wing grand coalition government, cobbled together after months of back-room deals, enjoys minuscule public support.

The British state, thrown into crisis by the Brexit-mandated withdrawal from the European Union, is led by a prime minister who is held in universal contempt, with no authority or legitimacy. Theresa May is so afraid of public opposition to British involvement in Syria and a repeat of Prime Minister David Cameron’s debacle in 2013 that she has announced plans to proceed with an attack without a vote in Parliament.

And the United States is embroiled in the greatest political crisis since Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, exacerbated by a growing strike wave of teachers and mounting opposition throughout the working  by class.

The rush by NATO to embrace a conflict with Russia leaves the distinct impression that the US and the European powers would welcome a de facto state of war, which they could use as a pretext to intensify their drive to censor the Internet and outlaw domestic political opposition. The NATO powers are in the grip of a war fever as reckless as it is criminal. As their internal crises intensify, their military provocations become all the more naked.

"Italian Politics One Month Later" by Outis Philalithopoulos:

First [Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio] declared that the Five Stars would stick with the EU, with the Euro, and with the Atlantic alliance.

Next he declared that he was willing to form a coalition government with any political party as long as it would respect the Five Stars’ rules.

After that, he declared that he would be happy to form a government with the PD provided they would save face for him by leaving Renzi out of it. Or he could form a government with Lega provided that they would save face for him by leaving Berlusconi out of it.

For the time being, the center-right parties have been fairly decent about maintaining their pacts, and it soon became clear that Salvini/Lega would stick to the coalition they had committed to. Di Maio then returned to the idea of forming a government with the PD. When the PD said it wasn’t interested, the Five Stars responded that for the good of the country it ought to be, considering that it could thereby atone for its mistakes.

The current state of play is that Di Maio is continuing on his desperate quest to find a person, party, angel, demon, or extraterrestrial life form that might be capable of giving him enough support to allow him to form a government. In this he draws strength from the 11 million Italians who believed in him and his promise to provide a sort of universal basic income at least to the unemployed – an attractive vision especially in the South given the high unemployment rate there. On the other hand, if it starts to look like the promises of the Five Stars are empty, then there is a significant risk that many of its voters will lose faith and bolt in the next election.

Di Maio doesn’t merely have to worry about the voters deserting – there are also real reasons to doubt the loyalty of some of the newly-elected Five Stars senators and deputies. After the previous election, there were about 40 defectors (deputies and senators) from the Five Stars: the so-called “mixed group,” which subsequently became a prize that other parties worked to attract into their own orbits in order to bulk up their coalitions.

Di Maio’s worry is that as he continues to fail to form a government, there will be fresh defections – there have already been eight. Many of the Five Stars’ representatives come from modest backgrounds. Although defecting would mean having to pay the fines mentioned above, that might seem like a small price to pay compared to having the opportunity to safeguard their (potentially lucrative) seats at the table.

All of this raises the stakes for Di Maio in his frantic efforts to try to accomplish something, somehow.