What Italy’s left-wing coalition is fighting for in the pandemic

reThe 2020 pandemic year started badly for Italy and did not improve towards the end. In February, China’s coronavirus hit Italy as the first country in Europe. In mid-March, the “Bergamo trucks” with the coffins of Covid victims became a symbol of the devastation that would soon be seen in other countries. The left-wing coalition in Rome under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte imposed Europe’s longest and strictest blockade from early March to late May.

When, after a quiet summer and fall, the second wave of infections arrived in early November, Rome again imposed a nationwide lockdown, this time graded according to regional infection rates. During Christmas and the new year, the whole country was once again declared a “red zone”. The New Year’s Eve review fell on a country that was once again haunted: In the second wave of infections, even more people died than in the first. More than 74,000 Covid victims were there at the end of the year, more than in any other country in Europe. As in spring, deaths in the second wave of infections averaged over eighty years. Once again, Italy failed in its task of protecting the most vulnerable from the virus.

The country is paying an immense price for what, according to the WHO, are the “inspiring” measures taken by Rome against the pandemic. The Italian economy is likely to have contracted by around ten percent in 2020, which is also a sad peak in Europe. The aid measures announced by the government will push the state debt burden to 160 percent of annual economic output. The solidarity manifested in spring – with collective chants from balconies, with national flags everywhere, with the motto “Tutto andrà bene” (Everything will be fine) – has evaporated in the usual trench warfare of social groups. And cockfighting within the fragile left coalition is as fierce as it was before the pandemic.

At the moment, the main focus is on the use of around 209 billion euros that Italy will receive from the so-called EU reconstruction fund. In his press conference at the end of the year, Conte verbally demanded that the country “not let this historic opportunity slip away” and that the government “not play with the accumulated credibility.” But it is precisely this accusation that the former head of government Matteo Renzi, who belongs to the left-wing coalition with his small party “Italia Viva”, founded in September 2019 as a split from the Social Democrats.

Former great Social Democratic reformer Renzi is notoriously rebellious because he doesn’t seem to have gotten over his own downfall from December 2016 to the present day. But his arguments are solid, even if Renzi, with his year-end offensive, apparently wants to squeeze more influence for himself and his party in the joint coalition with the Social Democrats and the five-star left-wing populist movement. Renzi accuses Conte of weakening the cabinet, in which Renzi’s party holds two of the 24 ministerial posts, as well as the parliament, with more and more expert bodies and working groups that are supposed to decide on the use of EU funds.