The President of the Republic accepts Draghi’s resignation and dissolves Parliament, so early elections will be held on September 25
The Italians will not be able to get rid of their politicians even during the summer holidays. The institutional crisis that began last week, when the populist 5-Star Movement (M5E) withdrew its support from Mario Draghi’s Executive, and which reached its critical moment yesterday with the collapse of the government coalition in a vote of confidence in the Senate, culminated this Thursday with the dissolution of the two Houses of Parliament and the call for early elections. They will be held on Sunday, September 25, so the campaign, which has already started, will take place during the torrid Italian summer, something unusual in a country where general elections usually take place in spring.
After accepting Draghi’s resignation in the morning, who will remain in office until the formation of the new Government, the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, announced that, due to what happened the day before in the Upper House, it was “inevitable” to end advance of the legislature. In principle, it was to end in the first months of 2023. In a decision that is difficult to justify before public opinion for causing a power vacuum in the midst of a terrifying panorama, due to high inflation, the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine, three of the political forces of the coalition chose to withdraw their support for the Executive: it was the M5E and the conservatives Forza Italia and the League.
The end of the “civil miracle” that the Government of national unity has meant, as Draghi defined it, is explained by the nervousness of these three parties when they saw that their permanence in the Cabinet was undermining their electoral prospects. The M5E, which has participated in the three Executives of this legislature, has gone from 32% in the last general elections, held in 2018, to staying at 11%, according to polls. Nor are the expectations buoyant for the League or for Forza Italia, who have seen how the terrain ate them up among the conservative Brothers of Italy voters, who have taken oil from the decision of their leader, Giorgia Meloni, not to participate in the coalition of Government. The entire space of the opposition has been like this for this far-right formation, which leads the polls and is already close to 24% in voting intentions. With this spectacular growth, Meloni has ended up dragging the League and Forza Italia, his partners in the conservative bloc, out of the coalition ahead of the next election.
After the debacle of the Government caused the day before, the former president of the European Central Bank (ECB) appeared early in the day in the Chamber of Deputies to announce that he was going to transmit his “determinations” to Mattarella. Before taking the floor, he received a heated applause from both the parliamentarians and the ministers of his Executive, many of whom applauded him in public even though they had stabbed him in private to try to advance the holding of the elections.
Visibly moved, Draghi thanked the gesture of affection and even allowed himself a joke about the supposed lack of feelings of central bankers, the profession he held for eight years in Frankfurt, headquarters of the ECB, and for five years before in Rome. “Sometimes also the heart of central bankers is used. Thank you very much for this and thank you for all the work done together in this period », he said in the hemicycle before going to the Quirinal Palace, seat of the Presidency of the Republic, where he had a half-hour conversation with Mattarella .
Both spoke of the perimeter in which the Government, which remains in office, will be able to move from now on, so that in principle it will be able to take charge of “current affairs” and will not have the support of Parliament. The Head of State took care to clarify in his speech that the Executive will nevertheless have sufficient “instruments” to respond to the demands that arise, among which he cited inflation, the effects of the war in Ukraine, the fight against pandemic and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), the ambitious program of reforms and European aid that foresees the receipt of 191,500 million euros until 2026. The power vacuum threatens to leave Italy without the 21,000 million euros of the next PNRR package.
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