Chaos has returned to Italy and, appropriately, it has once again started with the bad boy of Italian politics, Silvio Berlusconi, the same flamboyant playboy-cum-former prime minister who back in 2011 nearly withdrew Italy from the Eurozone and only a flagrant political intervention by the ECB prevented the collapse of the European experiment.
As we reported yesterday, in a statement published late on Wednesday night in Italy, Berlusconi changed his long-standing position and said he'd be open to an agreement between the League and the Five-Star Movement (otherwise known as M5S) to form a ruling coalition that wouldn't include his center-right party, Forza Italia. And so, with his blessing, on Thursday the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League were on the verge of forming a Eurosceptic government in which Europe's third-largest economy would be the latest to succumb to the populist wave unleashed by a decade of central bank errors and record income and wealth disparity.
The two leaders wasted no time, and Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star leader, and Matteo Salvini, the League leader, promptly met to try to iron out details of a potential agreement, including who become next prime minister. Key cabinet positions, including the finance ministry and foreign ministry, were also being discussed according to the FT.
In a joint statement after meeting on Thursday, Di Maio and Salvini described a “positive climate to define the government's agenda and priorities” and said “technical” meetings among staff would begin in the afternoon. “In terms of the composition of the executive, and the premier, significant steps forward were taken amid constructive collaboration on all sides, with the aim of quickly giving an answer and a political government to the country,” they said.
To be sure, the two had held infrequent talks for the past few weeks, with no concrete outcomes decided due to the veto power bestowed upon Bunga Bunga; however, with the Berlusconi blessing, the probability of a government becomes a virtual certainty. The reason: the 81-year-old Berlusconi had previously ruled out offering his support to a Five Star-League government unless his party was fully represented in the executive. At the same time, Five Star had vowed not to govern with Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, seeing it as part of the traditional political class it has been trying to unseat. This changed on Wednesday night reported yesterday, the octogenarian playboy gave a green light to a deal, saying that while Forza Italia would vote against a Five Star-League government in parliament, this would not jeopardise his alliance with Mr. Salvini on a local and regional level, where they rely on each other in many municipal and regional councils.
