Because the war between Conte and Renzi is not over
What will happen between Conte and Renzi after the trust in the Senate with the abstention of Italia Viva
It is really true, even in politics, that whoever wounds by the sword perishes, fortunately only metaphorically in our case. Which is that of the non-government crisis that Giuseppe Conte, while speaking of it to the Chambers as something "open" after the exit of the two Renzian ministers and the explanatory press conference by Renzi himself, did not want to open at all with his resignation . Therefore the President of the Republic had to stay at the window, patiently waiting for the Prime Minister to follow the preferred path to the traditional consultations at the Quirinale, possible postponement to the Chambers or assignment to resolve it.
In speaking to the head of state on the conclusions of the double parliamentary debate promoted independently and above all on the vote of confidence in the Senate, Conte must have felt a minimum of embarrassment, not having been able to really get rid of Renzi. Which was also his goal by escaping the even formal opening of the crisis, sure of collecting so many votes outside the original boundaries of his second government to permanently put out of the game the former mayor of Florence, former prime minister, former secretary of the Democratic Party and now leader of the small but not overwhelmed parliamentary group of living Italy. To whom I personally attribute the blame, at least, to having returned to the political news an abbreviation -Iv- that had disappeared with the not-so-glorious end of Antonio Di Pietro's Italia dei Valori.
The relative majority gathered by Conte in the Senate with 156 votes, including two last-minute defectors from Forza Italia and three senators for life, as such non-electives, was able to be achieved thanks to the also relative opposition of Renzi. If the sixteen Renzians had voted against, adding to the 140 no of the center right there would have been a tie that would have forced the prime minister to resign. Renzi was therefore not wrong to boast of the "decisive" role preserved in a path even wanted by Conte – I repeat – to prevent it.
The supporters of the Prime Minister are obviously confident that in the coming weeks or months, also taking advantage of the opportunity of the necessary reorganization of the ministerial structure to fill the two posts of minister and that of undersecretary left by the Renzians, new responses to the appeal count for the "Willing". Equally confident is the expectation of the leaders of the Democratic Party to snatch more from Renzi than just the two deputies who have just returned to the Nazarene. But precisely in this situation of necessary search for new members, the majority that emerged from the parliamentary passage wanted by Conte is difficult, if not impossible, to catalog or define.
It is certainly a weak majority in the numbers in the Senate, where, moreover, it does not exist at all in some commissions, certainly projected to the right despite the efforts of Massimo D'Alema, among others, to hear and classify on the left the alleged changes that have occurred in the framework political with the break between Conte, "the most popular" among the men in the field, and Renzi, the "least popular" or "most unpopular".
Of this curious majority – also hanging on the efficacy of the therapy prescribed over the phone or in another way by that strange "crisis doctor" who called himself Mastella, in the hope that the automatic corrector will not turn me into Mattarella, as happened unfortunately in a passage of the previous article on the imaginative mayor of Benevento – the indisputable weakness is striking considering the seriousness of the problems still open in the country: in addition to the government crisis, the ongoing pandemic, the unknowns of the vaccination campaign, a substantial economic recession , the increase in social imbalances, the continuing difficulties in relations with the European Union. Where a commissioner, albeit well disposed towards Italy, like the former Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has already made it known that the plan for the use of the continental funds of the recovery does not go well even with the improvements made to the original text contested by Renzi.
Let's go back to him, the ghost that Conte seems obsessed with as if he were dead. But Renzi is alive and well. And I think that the head of the government will not be able to really get rid of it easily, as well as the Democratic Party, of which the former secretary remains a thorn in his side, capable – even without drawing a direct benefit, given the polls and the results of the administrative elections he has recently participated – to make him appear too conditioned by the grillini. Although they would have very little to boast about because of the identity crisis that has transformed their movement into a quasi-party, united against Renzi but divided into an indefinite number of currents or "souls", as Conte prefers to call them. Which owes them the unexpected arrival at Palazzo Chigi in 2018 and confirms it the following year, albeit passing from a yellow-green majority to a Giallorossi majority.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-non-e-finita-la-guerra-fra-conte-e-renzi/ on Thu, 21 Jan 2021 05:48:08 +0000.