Italian Left in 11th-hour push to solve political crisis

The summer government crisis that shook Italy last week has provided a window of opportunity for the battered Italian left to clinch a governing alliance with the populist Five Star Movement, derailing plans by League’s leader Matteo Salvini to push the country to early polls.

However, deep internal divisions within the main opposition force, the center-left Democratic Party (PD), risk thwarting such a deal, which would corner Mr Salvini, the interior minister, and his hard-right League by delaying prospects of new elections in autumn.

The unexpected alliance between the PD and its arch-rivals of the Five Stars began to emerge last Tuesday, when a divided Senate was quickly reconvened from summer recess to vote on the date of a no-confidence motion against the populist government tabled by the League.

The League’s abrupt move was aimed at quickly bringing down the litigious coalition it formed with the Five Stars 14 months ago - a government that has often split over key economic measures and Salvini’s hard-line anti-immigration policies.

Mr Salvini is eager to capitalise on his soaring popularity and the League’s success in May’s European elections, when the right-wing party doubled its votes to over 34% from 2018 elections, while the Five Stars almost halved them to 17%.      In a surprise move, however, the PD and the 5 Stars voted together to suspend the League’s no-confidence motion, showing that, with the support of the smaller left-wing party LEU, they could still hold a key majority in the upper house.

Ahead of Conte’s crucial address to the Senate next Tuesday, after which the premier may resign and formally open a government crisis, mediators from both the PD and Five Stars are frantically negotiating to reach a deal seen as the only option to stop Mr Salvini’s ascent to power with a far-right coalition.

According to the latest opinion polls, the League and its former allies from Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia and Giorgia Meloni's far-right Brothers of Italy could win 50% of votes in Italy heads to the polls. One of the main sponsors of a PD-5Stars alliance is former premier Matteo Renzi, who still holds a strong influence over PD lawmakers, but is highly unpopular among Italian leftist voters.

Mr Renzi has repeatedly invited his party to unite and back a short-term “anti-Salvini government” with the Five Stars, which would be responsible to approve by year-end a budget law able to avert a painful 23-billion-euro VAT hike that risks plunging Italy into a new recession.   But the newly-elected PD’s secretary Luigi Zingaretti and his party leadership, struggling to define a common strategy for the battled PD, believe that an alliance with the Five Stars would further split up leftist voters in case of new elections.

They also fear that Mr Renzi’s bid hides a plan to regain power within the party and even create his own political group.   In an op-ed published by Italian daily Il Messaggero on Sunday, former premier and influential leftist leader Romano Prodi backed the idea of a longer-term alliance with the Five Stars, which could even last until the end of the current legislature in 2023.  That plan has been dubbed “Ursula,” as it would bring together the Italian parties, including moderate fringes of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, that joined forces in the European Parliament to elect the new Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.