Italy’s Salvini Faces Pressure to Force Early Election
Italy’s Salvini Faces Pressure to Force Early Election
(Bloomberg) -- Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is facing pressure to force an early election this year from lieutenants frustrated by dealing with an unruly coalition partner.
Several senior members of Salvini’s League are urging their chief to capitalize on a growing lead in opinion polls to ditch the anti-establishment Five Star Movement which is hampering their efforts to deliver on election promises, according to a League government member and a senior party official who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations.
Cabinet Undersecretary Giancarlo Giorgetti, a party strategist who is close to Salvini, has repeatedly voiced his frustration, the party official said.
Giorgetti told League lawmakers he spends more time sorting out problems created by Five Star than getting their measures through and is constantly managing crises, according to the official. Giorgetti’s office and a League spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the remarks.
Some senior League figures would favor elections as early as April, ahead of May’s European Parliament elections which Salvini is portraying as a showdown between champions of national sovereignty and an elite of interfering eurocrats and Franco-German domination.
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With the League riding high in opinion polls at about 32 percent support, an early general election could give Salvini a chance to seize the premiership possibly at the head of a center-right coalition, with the Forza Italia party of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi and the small far-right Brothers of Italy group
Another pressure point is a criminal case brought against Salvini by a prosecutor in Sicily. The deputy premier is facing potential charges over his refusal to let a ship with rescued migrants dock in Italy last summer. That puts Five Star in a bind: the party has long campaigned for political accountability but is reluctant to antagonize the League.
“The government is wobbling,” La Stampa quoted Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte as saying, before he left Tuesday for a summit of Mediterranean leaders in Cyprus.
Salvini himself is reining in his lieutenants. When urged to pull the plug on the coalition soon, Salvini tells them that there is no guarantee that early elections would actually take place, said the government member.
It’s up to President Sergio Mattarella to decide whether to dissolve parliament and he could instead seek a new coalition possibly involving the center-left Democratic Party and Five Star -- or even appoint a technocrat prime minister similar to ex-premier Mario Monti.
Instead Salvini is urging his party’s leadership to set its sights on the EU elections. He argues that the League could emerge as Italy’s biggest political force and would increase its leverage with Mattarella.
Odd Couple
Salvini and his fellow deputy premier, Luigi Di Maio of Five Star, are constantly at loggerheads, over everything from the 2019 budget to security policy and immigration. League lawmakers and voters are growing increasingly frustrated by the cost of Five Star’s landmark promise, welfare benefits for the poor.
If it wasn’t for Five Star’s spending pledges, the League could have delivered significant tax cuts in the budget, a boon for small- and medium-sized businesses in the wealthy north of Italy which constitute the League’s stronghold, the government member said. To compound the tensions, Five Star is pushing ahead with plans to force shops to close on Sundays and public holidays, despite concern from businesses about lost revenue and competition from online retailers.
Senior League figures also worry that if they wait for elections, their support may suffer because the euro region’s third-biggest economy is flirting with recession and that will hurt voters.
Italy has been struggling to break out of a years-long trap of economic stagnation and the European Commission projects the country will have the slowest growth rate in the 19-nation euro area this year and next. On Thursday, Italy’s national statistics bureau Istat will release its preliminary estimate for gross domestic product for the fourth quarter.
If his party does perform strongly in the European vote, Salvini might still wait until the fall to focus on securing the best possible post on the next European Commission before pulling the plug on the coalition, the government member said.
--With assistance from Andrew Atkinson and Zoe Schneeweiss.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Follain in Rome at jfollain2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Alessandra Migliaccio
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