Italy’s Five Star populists and social democrats try to form shaky coalition government

Mike Head 

Despite denouncing each other vehemently until days ago, the leaders of Italy’s “centre-left” opposition Democratic Party (PD) and the populist Five Star Movement yesterday agreed to form a coalition government. Their sudden alliance is an attempt to prevent early elections triggered by last week’s departure of the far-right Lega party from its 14-month coalition administration with Five Star.

Reuters reported that the financial markets and the European political establishment greeted the news enthusiastically, “betting that Italy will get a fiscally prudent government.” Elections could be forestalled until 2023, while deficit-cutting austerity measures are imposed. Together the two parties would have a narrow majority in parliament. But the proposed partnership is likely to prove highly unstable and crisis-ridden.

In the first place, the two parties have not even agreed on a shared policy platform and team of ministers. Five Star chief Luigi Di Maio and his PD counterpart Nicola Zingaretti pledged to find common ground “for the good of the country.” Yet both parties are committed to further harsh spending cuts directed against the working class under conditions of high unemployment, worsening social inequality and budget-slashing dictates from the European Union (EU).

President Sergio Mattarella, himself from the PD, was widely expected to grant lawyer Giuseppe Conte, the existing Five Star-anointed prime minister, a mandate to form a new government today. Mattarella had been meeting party leaders in emergency talks to head off the capitalist elite’s latest political crisis, which was provoked by Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who quit as interior minister and tabled a no-confidence motion against the government.

Despite these manoeuvres at the highest levels of the Italian ruling class, the tentative accord could unravel quickly. Unexpectedly, the founder of Five Star, Beppe Grillo issued a statement late on Wednesday saying the ministers should be technocrats and not elected politicians. Grillo, who came to prominence by presenting Five Star as an “anti-establishment” movement, evidently fears a backlash from the base it cultivated on that basis.

In a related complication, Five Star has said it will put any deal with the PD to an online vote of its members. Many Five Star supporters have taken to social media to denounce such a pact with the party that Five Star has in the past derided as part of the “establishment.”

Even if a government can be formed, it will be on a collision course with the working class. The next government must present a budget that complies with European Union deficit guidelines by October 15. To do so, €23 billion must be saved, which will require massive further cuts to social spending at the expense of working class households.

That conflict could be cynically exploited by the Lega and its allies, which would be nominally in opposition, to divert the immense social discontent in reactionary nationalist and authoritarian directions, as the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Nervous about the political instability in Europe’s fourth largest economy, the corporate media internationally claimed that the new coalition could sideline Salvini and the fascistic “hard right.” The New York Times said the “sudden turnabout in Italy’s politics” was “a relief to the European establishment after 14 months of euroskeptic provocations, anti-migrant crackdowns and flouting of the [EU] bloc’s financial rules.”