Rome: The leader of Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement on Monday called for early elections in June, saying efforts to form a coalition after last month’s inconclusive vote had got nowhere.
“At this point for me there is no other solution, we have to go back to the polls as soon as possible,” Luigi Di Maio said in a statement on Facebook in which he blamed other parties for refusing to negotiate with 5-Star.
Di Maio appealed to Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League, to join his call to hold a snap vote in June.
The March 4 election produced a hung parliament. A centre-right alliance led by Salvini’s League won the most seats, while 5-Star emerged as easily the biggest single party.
Five Star head Luigi Di Maio signalled that discussions were no longer viable after Matteo Renzi, the Democrats’ former leader and ex-prime minister, said his party’s executive should reject talks at a meeting scheduled May 3.
“We did everything to form a government in the interest of Italians,” Di Maio said in a blog post late on Sunday, acknowledging that without Renzi’s backing Democratic lawmakers won’t be able to guarantee support for a Five Star-led government. The Democratic Party, known as the PD, rejected issues close to citizens’ interests “and they will pay for it,” he said.
The search for a new Italian government is at an impasse two months after a general election produced a hung parliament. With the political forces delicately balanced, the centre-right received a boost on Monday as results of local elections in the northern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia put its candidate ahead. That fillip followed another win in the southern region of Molise earlier this month.
Back in Rome, formal meetings with a mediator chosen by President Sergio Mattarella last week prompted Five Star and the PD to ask their members to decide whether to start talks on forming a government.
Di Maio had previously failed to reach a deal with the Euro-sceptic League after its leader, Matteo Salvini, refused to abandon the right-wing alliance that won most seats in the March 4 elections.
Salvini’s decision appeared to be vindicated as early returns suggested that more than half of voters in the Friuli region of 1.2 million people bordering Austria and Slovenia backed the alliance’s candidate, Massimiliano Fedriga from the League, with more than 90 per cent of ballots counted. The Five Star’s candidate was running third.
“The latest developments are slowly but surely pointing to new elections,” said Vincenzo Longo, an investment analyst at IG Markets in Milan. “This scenario would not have a strong negative impact on markets, provided that the timing will be short. A snap vote would be better received than a new vote next year.”
The centre-right may seek a mandate for Salvini to lead a minority government, newspaper La Stampa reported on Monday, without saying where it got the information.
With Five Star and the PD failing to reach a deal, Mattarella’s options include appealing to all parties to back a short-lived “president’s government” led by a technocrat, or triggering fresh elections in early summer or in the fall.
