After 14 months of being ignored, mocked and yanked around by his deputies in Italy’s nationalist-populist government, the departing prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, used his resignation speech last week as a last-ditch audition — filled with previously unseen flashes of gravitas and steel — for the leading role in the government to come.
On Thursday, Mr. Conte got the part.
Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, gave the little-known lawyer turned political power broker the task of forming a sequel, but drastically different, government known as Conte II. (“Conte Reloaded,” preferred the conservative daily Il Giornale.)
Mr. Conte will now begin meetings with all party leaders and is expected next week to submit to Mr. Mattarella a cabinet that, if approved, will then be brought to parliament for a confidence vote.
[A new government takes shape in Italy, sidelining Matteo Salvini]
In accepting the mandate, Mr. Conte said on Thursday that he wanted to win back lost time “to allow Italy, a founding member of the European Union, to rise again as a protagonist” and “transform this moment of crisis into an opportunity.”
He acknowledged that he had entertained “doubts” about taking on a reconstituted government after the last one collapsed, but said he “overcame this perplexity” out of a responsibility to serve Italy’s interests.
In taking on “this political project,” he said, he did not represent a single party, but the interests of all Italians, something he said Italians had come to appreciate.
A week after the collapse of his last government, a nationalist-populist alliance between the anti-migrant League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, Mr. Conte will preside over a populist/anti-populist coalition between Five Star and the center-left Democratic Party.
The joining of two parties that have called each other every name in the book, including Mafiosi and kidnappers, internet trolls and hatemongers, was remarkable.
But so was the resuscitation of Mr. Conte, who hardly seemed to matter through much of the last government, where he was overshadowed by the hard-right leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, ostensibly his deputy.
Mr. Conte once even called a news conference to remind the country that he was the prime minister.
“I’m not here just to scrape by or drift,” he said at that June conference, adding, “I can and want to do more.”
Now he will have an opportunity, as the European establishment is hoping, to help Italy heal its rifts in the European Union, rediscover a modicum of financial responsibility and return to the table of European leaders.
Mr. Conte, fond of pocket kerchiefs and purple ties, is studiously dapper even when discussing legislation with a man in his underwear on a Naples balcony. His florid vocabulary — he has casually dropped words like logomachy — sounds official without actually saying much. In time, he has overcome a delivery and facial expressions that seemed marked by fear and indigestion.
“He’s a minor figure who managed to carve out a role for himself,” said Donatella Di Cesare, a professor of political philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome.
“He had no history,” she added, which helped him fit into the part of an institutional administrator who could give the harshly euroskeptic, populist and anti-migrant government a more amenable face. The parties chose him, she said, because he was “someone who played the role.”
Newspaper headlines on Thursday expressed admiration for his transformation. “He went from yes man to the lord of politics,” read La Stampa. “A quasi-leader who put bullies in their place,” read La Repubblica. “A Portrait of a Puppet Who Became Prime Minister,” read il Foglio.
And he has made friends in high places.
During a side-by-side news conference at the White House in July 2018, President Trump introduced Mr. Conte as “my new friend” and on Tuesday came through for him, endorsing him in a tweet, albeit one that spelled Mr. Conte’s name wrong. (Mr. Trump called him Giuseppi.)
That vote of confidence was invoked on Wednesday night by Five Star’s political leader, Luigi Di Maio. “The endorsement from Donald Trump made us understand that we are on the right track,” he said in announcing the agreement with the Democratic Party to bring Mr. Conte back.
At the 2018 news conference, Mr. Trump stressed that he and Mr. Conte had a lot in common. In one sense, he had a point.
“Like the United States, Italy is currently under enormous strain as a result of illegal immigration. And they fought it hard,” Mr. Trump said. “And the prime minister, frankly, is with us today because of illegal immigration.”
It was a backlash to the migrant crisis, and the promised crackdown by the League and the more subtle anti-migrant messaging of the populist Five Star movement, that resulted in their election.
If Mr. Conte never seemed entirely at ease with the harsh anti-migrant policies, at times asking Mr. Salvini to at least let women and children off stranded ships, he never stood up to him and signed off on the toughest anti-migrant legislation.
His greatest concerns seemed to be about the political damage Mr. Salvini wrought on the Five Star Movement, with which he was clearly aligned. In December, an Italian television program caught Mr. Conte appealing in so-so English to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at the coffee bar of an international meeting for pointers on how Five Star could stop Mr. Salvini’s electoral juggernaut.
“We have made polls and they are worrying, because Salvini is at 35, 36 percent,” he told Ms. Merkel. She nodded politely.
Before the election in March 2018 that brought Five Star to power, its leaders introduced him as a potential minister in a Five Star government. When they needed the support of another party to govern and turned to the League, the two parties settled on Mr. Conte as a consensus prime minister.
He had a rough start. His rollout was complicated by the discovery that he inflated his résumé. Only last year he seemed unsure of his job security when, while acting as prime minister, he was caught planning to take part in an English proficiency exam for a teaching job at a Rome university.
In his first weeks on the job, he was caught in Parliament asking Mr. Di Maio, technically his deputy, if he was allowed to say something.
But it was Mr. Di Maio he ended up eclipsing.
In Mr. Conte’s resignation speech last week, as he lambasted Mr. Salvini, seated to his right, as a dangerous, authoritarian, disloyal opportunist who cared more about his own political success than the country, Mr. Di Maio, seated on Mr. Conte’s left, brimmed with visible delight.
Mr. Di Maio, his own poll numbers cratering, had sought to elevate Mr. Conte over the past year as a counterbalance to Mr. Salvini. Even Mr. Salvini’s social media gurus admired Mr. Conte’s increased popularity, which they attributed to his institutional bearing.
At first, the Democratic Party insisted on a clean break with the previous government. But the insistence of the Five Star Movement on Mr. Conte, and Mr. Conte’s track record of not mattering much, made it easy for the Democratic Party’s negotiators to accept him as a condition of an alliance that would bring them back to power.
And in negotiations over the past week, the Democratic Party infuriated Mr. Di Maio by making it clear that it now naturally considered Mr. Conte as its chief interlocutor and the Five Star Party leader, despite his lack of official membership.
Mr. Di Maio, whose previous job experience consisted largely of working as an usher at a soccer stadium, was again forced to search for a job in the government while support for Mr. Conte came from the party’s highest authority.
Beppe Grillo, a founder of the Five Star Movement and one of its power brokers, wrote on his blog Tuesday that God had personally given him a message to send to Mr. Conte. In the post, which Mr. Grillo signed as God, he made it clear that Mr. Conte was the chosen one.
“Am I wrong,” he wrote, “or one of the biggest fears in Italy today is that you get back in the playing field, Mr. Giuseppe?”
Even Mr. Di Maio had to exalt the once-and-future leader.
“A great interpreter of this new humanism, how he himself likes to call it,” Mr. Di Maio said through a gritted smile on Wednesday night. “A man of great courage, who has demonstrated his will to serve the country with a spirit of self-sacrifice and abnegation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/world/europe/italy-conte-government-salvini.html
2019-08-29 10:30:00Z
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