Five Star-Democrat coalition government announced in Italy

Alex Lantier

A shaky coalition government between the Democratic Party (PD) and the Five-Star Movement (M5S) is set to be sworn in at 8 a.m. this morning in Rome.

Yesterday, outgoing Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte informed President Sergio Mattarella that he had found the necessary support in parliament for an M5S-PD coalition government. A month ago, on August 8, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the neofascist Lega had withdrawn his support from Conte’s M5S-Lega government, bringing it down. While Salvini was seeking new elections, hoping to form his own government in alliance with the fascistic Fratelli d’Italia party, the M5S and PD desperately sought to block elections and thus reliably keep the M5S in power.

As he announced his new government to the press, Conte pledged: “Based on our program oriented to the future, we will dedicate our energy, our skills and our passion to make Italy better in the interests of all of its citizens.”

But the new M5S-PD government, cobbled together in backroom deals whose stated purpose was to avoid elections and any input from the population, is no alternative to its far-right predecessor. It will maintain European Union (EU) austerity and the assault on refugees, setting it on a collision course with the working class. It also opens the door to Salvini and his allies falsely posturing as defenders of democracy and the electoral process and as opponents of austerity, while escalating their virulently nationalistic and anti-refugee propaganda.

Ministerial nominations include Roberto Gualtieri, a member of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) and now in the PD, who will lead the austerity offensive as economy minister. With Italy’s debt standing at €2.3 trillion or 132 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Brussels is expected to demand tens of billions of euros in austerity measures. This year’s Italian budget is to be negotiated by October.

Le Monde hailed Gualtieri’s nomination as a “peace offering” to the EU: an advisor to pro-austerity PD governments under Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, he is widely expected to ruthlessly implement social cuts dictated by Brussels. Already, unemployment stands at over 10 percent and at nearly one third of youth 15-24 in Italy. Further austerity would likely savage its economy, which contracted in the second half of 2018 and is set to grow only an anemic 0.1 percent this year.

Conte named Roberto Speranza, a leader of the small Free and Equal (LEU) party, as health minister, apparently to ensure that his government could count on LEU support in the upcoming confidence vote. He divided all the remaining ministerial positions save one between the M5S and the PD.

M5S leader Luigi di Maio will become foreign minister, while Lorenzo Guerini, an associate of Renzi at the PD, is slated to become defense minister. Conte also nominated former Milan police prefect Luciana Lamborghese, who is affiliated to no political party, to replace Salvini as interior minister. Together, they will have the task of continuing the assault on refugees that Salvini made his trademark policy, provoking mass protests in several Italian cities.

While Salvini publicly and aggressively refused to allow any refugees from the Mediterranean into Italy, the main lines of his immigration policy were put in place by his PD predecessor. PD Interior Minister Marco Minniti worked with the EU to seal off the Mediterranean Sea, establish the Libyan Coast Guard and Libyan concentration camps to hunt down refugee vessels and imprison refugees in horrific conditions in Africa, and block the arrival of refugees from Africa to Europe.