Matteo Salvini calls confidence vote in Italian PM

Election could be held as early as October as government falls apart.

Matteo Salvini on Friday called a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte | Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

August 9, 2019 5:25 pm CET

By Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli

ROME — Italy’s far-right League party on Friday called a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, hours after party leader Matteo Salvini declared that the coalition government was dead.

Lawmakers will be ordered back to parliament to vote “as soon as possible.” If the motion is successful, Conte would be forced to resign, which could mean a snap election as early as October.

The motion was filed less than 36 hours after parliament went on recess until September and is the first time in the history of the Italian republic that a government crisis has been formally triggered during the summer break.

The move also brings to a head tensions that have been brewing for a long time and which came fully out into the open on Thursday evening, when Salvini and Conte both issued statements acknowledging that the coalition between the League and the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, with Conte as a compromise prime minister, is over.

A government collapse would cause major uncertainty for the European Union; Italy is the third-largest economy in the eurozone and the EU’s fourth most populous member. Italy has also not yet nominated its candidate for the next European Commission.

“We are ready to head back to the polls, the League mocked Italians,” Di Maio said.

League lawmakers said the prime minister no longer has their confidence because he did not take part in Wednesday’s parliamentary debate on the future of a high-speed rail link between Turin and Lyon in France, which the 5Stars want to block. The League, which backs the rail link, voted with the main opposition parties to reject the 5Stars’ plan.

Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, the president of the Senate — the upper house of parliament — will meet with the heads of the party delegations in the chamber on Monday afternoon to decide the date of the confidence vote.

According to one person involved in the talks, it is unlikely to take place before the week beginning August 19 as Thursday, August 15 is a public holiday and civil servants and staffers need time to get back to Rome.

That’s likely to infuriate Salvini, who on Thursday proposed Monday or Tuesday as possible dates for the vote, a call that was rejected out of hand by Conte.

“The interior minister is not the one who decides the next steps but he’s the one who will have to head to parliament to explain why he pulled the plug on this government,” Conte told the press Thursday night.

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5Stars leader Luigi Di Maio, the other deputy prime minister along with Salvini, sided with Conte on Thursday, saying “Salvini made the government collapse to capitalize on his popularity.”

Earlier, Di Maio said in a Facebook post: “We are ready to head back to the polls, the League mocked Italians.”

If Conte loses the confidence vote it would not automatically trigger a new election, but it would force the prime minister’s resignation. If Conte wins — which is highly unlikely — the League would have to withdraw its Cabinet ministers.

Either way, President Sergio Mattarella would take charge of the process of trying to find a new government. Any such attempt is unlikely to be successful but he could install a technocratic caretaker government to take charge and pass the 2020 national budget before calling an election for early 2020.

That is the 5Stars’ preferred option, according to three party officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It would give us more time to prepare,” one of them said.

“Italians have the right to head back to the polls but I’m getting a strange feeling” they won’t, Salvini said Friday.