On the second day of the NATO summit in Madrid, Italy is without a prime minister. The head of the Italian Executive, Mario Draghi, has delegated the Minister of Defense, Lorenzo Guerini, to represent the country at the meeting of the Atlantic Alliance. Draghi decided to return to Rome early, after having dinner with his counterparts at the Prado Museum. In the capital a new storm awaited him among his partners in the Executive.
The explanation given by his team is that Draghi must chair this Thursday a meeting of the Council of Ministers on major economic measures to contain the escalation in energy prices, a meeting of such importance that he wants to prepare well. However, unofficially, the meeting coincides with this series of tensions in the broad coalition that supports his government, especially two of the parties that make it up, the 5-Star Movement (M5E) and the League.
The M5E is in full implosion after the Foreign Minister, Luigi Di Maio, left the formation and created his own parliamentary group, taking with him some sixty senators and deputies. When Draghi was in Madrid, it was reported in the Italian media that the premier had told the M5E founder, the comedian Beppe Grillo, that he should do without the political leader, Giuseppe Conte, during a telephone conversation. "It seems to me sincerely serious that a technical prime minister, invested by us, interferes in the lives of the political forces that support him," criticized Conte, in the biggest direct attack on Draghi to date.
Sources close to the prime minister assure this newspaper that the decision was made on Wednesday morning, long before this fight took place. Asked about this in Madrid, Draghi assured that he had already spoken with Conte and that they had arranged to meet in the coming days. “The Government is not in danger”, he reassured him. His office also denied that he had transferred those assessments to Beppe Grillo.
At the same time, the League, which suffers in the polls due to the advancement of Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, is outraged by the parliamentary initiatives of the Democratic Party (PD) and the M5E to legalize cannabis and facilitate the granting of nationality to the children of immigrants. The party's leader, Matteo Salvini, considers it evidence of the "will of the left to blow up the government", given the incompatibility of these proposals with his program.
Behind these tensions is the fracture left by the second round of the municipal elections in the coalition of the Italian right, which has lost some symbolic cities such as Verona, which has passed into the hands of a former soccer player, Damiano Tommasi, supported by the left . Salvini's leadership is being questioned, but so is Meloni's, who many do not see as capable of governing if he wins the next election. Including, surely, the founder of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi. They are all working in a meeting to fix these obvious problems. With this panorama, Draghi decided that the best thing he could do was, after having dinner at the Prado Museum with the rest of the leaders, pack his suitcase and get on the presidential plane.
