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A year ago, the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, faced multiple internal crises and was in charge of an unstable government made up of two parties that had spent the previous five years as sworn and bitter enemies. Few in Rome believed it would last much longer than six months.
Twelve months later, and in the midst of a pandemic, to the surprise of many, Conte continues to lead that rickety coalition between the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party. But having won accolades for his calm handling of the biggest economic and health crisis in Italy’s postwar history, he now faces the biggest challenge from his prime minister yet.
Conte, a quiet-spoken law professor who was once derided as little more than an interim leader, is on his way to becoming one of Italy’s 10 oldest prime ministers since the end of World War II. In six months he will have been in office longer than his predecessor, but one, Matteo Renzi, a result that most Italian experts would have believed impossible last year.
“From the beginning of the [coronavirus] In crisis, Conte’s communication strategy was to be very crude and honest with the country, and in doing so he embodied the authority that people wanted at the time, ”said Valentina Gentile, assistant professor of political philosophy at Luiss University in Rome.
On Sunday, hit by a new outbreak of coronavirus cases that Italy seemed to have previously curbed, and with public upheaval erupting in the streets, the prime minister delivered the kind of frank television speech that had had him loved by the Italian people for the first phase of the crisis.
Italian police officers during a protest by far-right activists against government restrictions in central Turin on Monday. Photograph: Marco Bertorello / AFP via Getty Images
But this time, the reaction to the new restrictions that included closing restaurants and bars at 6 p.m. for a month was less sympathetic. Italy’s right-wing opposition seized on the new measures that heralded a return to a partial national blockade as evidence that Conte’s highly praised response to the first wave had in fact not worked.
Criticism of Salvini
When news emerged that Conte’s trusted spokesman and doctor, Rocco Casalino, had tested positive for coronavirus, Matteo Salvini, leader of the Anti-Migration League party, took to radio waves from Italy to condemn the measures, arguing that they would ruin even more an economy already battered.
Salvini threatened to take legal action to reverse Conte’s decree, saying that closing restaurants that had invested heavily in complying with regulations aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus was treason. “Why take it out on them?” I ask. Salvini posted images on social media of struggling restaurant owners explaining their plight.
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the opposition Italian Brothers party, said Conte’s government should immediately pay money to companies that would be damaged by the new measures. “Conte has a duty to apologize and compensate them,” he said. “It is not correct to criminalize an entire sector after the state has given them certain recipes so that they can reopen safely.”
Daniele Albertazzi, a politics reader at the University of Birmingham, said Conte had benefited from being perceived as a stranger to the Italian political system in a country where suspicion of career politicians runs deep.
Like many other leaders in Europe, Conte has enjoyed [an] rise in popularity, but he’s also played it well. It has grown and has surprised people, ”said Albertazzi. But this time is different from February or March. The economy will be very affected and people are getting very tired of the restrictions ”.
Unrest
The starkest display of that fatigue came over the weekend when isolated riots broke out in Naples, the largest city in southern Italy, in reaction to the prospect of new restrictions being imposed. On Saturday night, a group of protesters, some linked to far-right fringe groups, threw objects at police in Rome.
On Monday night protests against Conte’s new measures broke out across Italy; Footage from Milan showed a small group throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police car. In the southern city of Lecce, a group of protesters rushed over a police barricade shouting “freedom, freedom.”
Conte was also attacked for his statement over the weekend that the measures would allow Italians to have a “serene” Christmas. Right-wing politician and journalist Renato Farina wrote that the prime minister had threatened Italians with “coal at Christmas if we are to be bad citizens and disobey,” and “had transformed citizens into children.”
Gentile argues that Conte, however, remains in a strong political position, despite growing concern in Italy about the further increase in Covid-19 cases, because neither party in the ruling coalition wants elections anytime soon. term given the leadership that the right opposition holds in opinion polls.
However, in a country where political fortunes are notoriously volatile, Conte’s reputation gained during the first Covid-19 outbreak will quickly be tarnished if he is seen to be losing control of the situation. “How you handle the situation from here will be critical,” Gentile says.
Albertazzi cautions that history shows that even “outsider” politicians who are enthusiastically embraced by Italians as the embodiment of a break with the status quo can be expelled from the national scene just as quickly.
“We saw this with [the economist and former prime minister] Mario Monti ”, he said. “People who come from outside of politics are always quite attractive at first, as Italians hate political classes. But then people quickly get tired of them too. “- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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