In January, when Italy’s president Sergio Mattarella was due to retire, prime minister Mario Draghi persuaded him to stay on in the interests of political stability after seven rounds of parliamentary voting failed to produce an alternative candidate.
Last week Mattarella returned the favour in kind by refusing to accept Draghi’s resignation and the prime minister was told to appear before parliament tomorrow to see if he can hold his broad coalition together.
Some see the saga as an elaborate bluff by Draghi to whip his troops into line, but there is no guarantee the highly regarded technocrat and former governor of the European Central Bank will prevail. Elections scheduled for spring 2023, when Draghi was due to step down, may have to be brought forward.
It was too much to hope that Draghi’s appointment a year and a half ago at the head of a disparate unity government would do more than banish temporarily Italy’s ingrained instability. And, sure enough, the populist Five Star party, a key member of his cross-party government, last week boycotted a vote on a €26 billion aid package meant to help families cope with soaring inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
Draghi insisted he could not govern without a stable majority and went to see Mattarella. In his first year as prime minister, Draghi oversaw growth in GDP of 6.6 per cent, after a brutal 9 per cent contraction in 2020. He helped fix a faltering vaccination programme and won a European Union commitment for up to €200 billion in Covid recovery funds if Italy undertook reforms.
Disagreements with Five Star’s leader, Giuseppe Conte, about how that should be spent, and the latter’s barely veiled support for Russian president Vladimir Putin, tipped into an open breach.
The crisis comes at a particularly bad moment, when the gap between Italian and German borrowing costs has soared. Italy needs to roll over €200 billion of debt later this year and Draghi is widely seen throughout Europe as the only leader who can steady the ship.